It almost goes without saying that the gold standard of inbound call centre technology is a proper skills-based routing ACD. That’s the best way to ensure that the right agents get the right calls at the right time.
But…
While your agents are logged into the ACD, what happens if the prospect calls in to speak to the agent directly? After all, if someone has been working with Jane for the past week, that prospect should be able to get through to Jane, right? That definitely helps with the flow of the transaction.
But if Jane is otherwise occupied, like receiving calls from the inbound queue, you don’t want her phone ringing! Because if Jane does answer the phone, then she’s disrupting her whole inbound call flow and stepping outside the call center software suite.
Ideally, you want to have all calls that go to your agents coming through your ACD. Sure you can have a queue of their own for each of your agents. Setting that all up gets a little cumbersome though. Especially if you already have unique toll-free numbers coming in for your agents,adding all those skills and queues is going to be a huge pain once you get up past five or so agents.
The solution is fairly simple.
Personal queues.
Personal queues act as a queue that the agent is always logged into. In Q-Suite, you access the personal queue through DIDs or the agent’s own extension. When integrated with the extension, you can do a number of things such as going to voicemail or ringing the phone after a certain period of time.
But what is the personal queue really?
Simply defined, the personal queue is the queue that belongs only to that particular agent. Only that agent can get logged into it. When a call comes in to an agent’s personal queue, that call has the highest priority for that agent. The next time the agent finishes a call and accepts a new call, they will receive the longest waiting call from the personal queue.
Why is the personal queue the highest priority queue? If a call is coming into a personal queue, then that agent is the only agent who can handle the call. Therefore, it’s important that the agent receives that call next.
You can tie a personal queue into a DID through the PBX admin interface, but the more common method is to associate it with the user’s extension. The Q-Suite will check to see if the agent is logged in as an inbound agent when the call comes in. If so, that call can be handled as a personal queue call if the extension is configured that way.
If the agent isn’t logged in, then it can be configured to ring the agent’s extension directly and bypass the queue. In the drop down on the “Configure Extension” screen, you can specify that if they’re not logged in at the time of the call, the call will ring the extension directly and follow the normal extension dialing protocol from that point. Of course after that you can do things like have a go directly to voicemail, specify a set time before it goes to voicemail, or specify a “Find me, follow me” sequence.
By using personal queues, you’re able to introduce things like toll-free numbers for each of your agents, and direct client callbacks. This ensures the specific agent will receive the call if at all possible, while avoiding any disruption of the ACD call flow. By preventing your agents from pausing their ACD calls and switching phone devices or lines or any other things that they would need to do in order to answer that call, you’re helping maintain proper workflow and efficiency.