A skills-based routing call center ACD system is a magical thing. You assign your agents skills, they log in, and they’re taking calls from the right queues. What could be better than that? It works very well, keeps the calls flowing, and your agents talking to the right people.
Sometimes, though, you have a set of people who aren’t expected to do much with their phones. They may take a few calls a day, and not want or need an agent screen to manage their session and enter contact details. This could be a supervisor who’s just answering questions or explaining policy to an unusually irate customer. It could be your superstar technical team that is usually working on other things, but can spare the time to answer really tough questions.
In cases like this, the typical PBX queue that comes with Asterisk is fine. If you’re not tracking data from the call, and you’ve got a limited pool of people with roughly equivalent skills, you only need something that can route calls to the next available user. From the administrative side, it’s a little more manual to set up, but once it’s configured, your users only need to log in when they are ready to take calls, and log out when they’re done for the day (or are taking a break).
The normal way to do this is to set up a PBX queue, then create an Asterisk context that accepts the code entered by the user and acts accordingly. In this model, each queue will need its own login/logout code, and each user will have to know the code for the queue they are logging in to. Asterisk based call center software, such as Q-Suite, should make this functionality available, even when they offer super-awesome queues with skills and priorities.
If you’re using the PBX queues, you will have to do with fewer features. The queueing method has to be specified on configuration, such as round robin, longest wait, etc., and queue priorities could be an issue. Agent priorities are non-existent. Still, if some of your users don’t need to use the screens or handle a lot of calls, this method may be just right for them.