Imagine you have calls coming in that must be answered as immediately as possible. You also have calls coming in that don’t. Or you have a type of call that should be answered as a priority if it has been waiting less than 30 seconds, but after that it can wait like any other call. What tool would you use?
In these cases, queue priorities are what you need. In the Asterisk world, this is also sometimes referred to as queue weight. The idea is that one queue is more important, and if an agent can receive calls from more than one queue, the queue with greater priority should have its call handled first.
Why would you want to do such a thing? Well, you could have a queue that Gold Club members go into, and regular members go into the other. As long as a Gold Club member is waiting the next available agent should handle the call. You might also be handling contracts with differing levels of importance. There are a lot of reasons.
What are the pitfalls?
The biggest problem with setting one of your queues to always get answered first is agent starvation. If your agents are always busy serving the one queue, calls to another queue may never get handled, with calls abandoning or timing out before your agent can get to it. It’s sort of a nuclear option for call handling, so make sure you’ve thought it through before using this option.
You can avoid agent starvation by having calls from another queue time out and continue on to a queue with an equal (or higher) priority level. That may negate your reason for using priority in the first place. It can be a good safety valve, though. Dynamically reassigning agents is another possibility, if you have good live reporting and call center ACD software that allows this to be done.
To avoid confusion with agent skill priorities, consider how ties are broken:
- Queue Priority – if you have one agent waiting and a call in two or more queues, queue priority decides which call gets answered next. With equal priorities, the longest waiting call should get answered.
- Agent Skill Priority – if you have one call waiting and two agents ready to take it, agent skill priority decides who gets the call. If the priorities are the same, then the agent who’s waited the longest should get it.