Call Queue Questions

[good_call]

Hello! Looking for some answers to questions I have about a call queue I'd like to setup. I have been trying to decide between round robin and longest waiting polling strategies. I would like to know which is less prone to "status abuse," AKA people pulling themselves in and out of the queue or changing their status between Available, Away, DND, etc in an effort to avoid calls. It seems that 3cx doesn't have great built in options for tracking how long a user was available to take queue calls, unless I have missed something. So some key things I'd like answered are:

1. Is there a way for me to track when users were not available to take queued calls? Something like % time available or % time queued in for the user's given office hours?
2. Which polling strategy is less prone to status abuse? My next two questions probably better address my worries with these two strategies.
3. For longest waiting, does status change or queue out/in reset the timer for when they last took a queued call?
4. For round robin, is the order always fixed? If so, can an agent essentially dodge a call by seeing that the person before them received a call, queue out, wait for the next call to ring through, then queue back in so that they are now last in the rotation?

 

[VoIPTools]

Boy, if you are having that much trouble with your staff looking for ways to avoid work, then better reporting is certainly needed. You are not alone, and it is a common concern for business owners and call center managers.

Others in the forums will be better able to describe what is available natively in 3CX than me. I focus on custom solutions.

One of the things we offer is the ability to see how much time a user has spent in each status. But this can be a very complicated process if, for example, you don't automatically change a user's presence to "Away" outside of business hours. If a user can go home leaving their extension set to "Available", then when you capture how much time they were "Available" in a 24-hour period, that status is going to be over-represented in the data because it will include from midnight to 9:00 a.m. and from 5:00 p.m. to midnight. You could subtract the known number of hours the office is not open from the total, but this is even more complicated if individuals have their own unique office hours... and what do you do if some people remember to change their presence to "Away" at the end of the day, and some do not? Yes, this is messy, but fixable.

The second question is about how much time an agent was logged into the queue. My suggestion is that if they set their presence to anything other than "Available", have 3CX automatically log them out of a queue. But even that does not offer the full story. Just because I am logged into the queue, does not mean I am actually at my desk. I could take a trip to the bathroom and forget to logout. This situation can also be partially addressed by watching for missed calls and automatically logging the agent out of the queue. I would suggest setting the user that missed X consecutive calls to "DND", and let 3CX automatically log them out of the queue. That's what our 3CX Queue Notifier tool does.

The data is all there to answer your questions if you are disciplined in your 3CX setup, you capture the necessary data, and you have the capability to make the custom reports you need.

Our 3CX Exporter, and 3CX Custom Presence Status tools, together, can get all the data you need. The next version of our Exporter tool (to be released shortly) includes a very nice report designer built-in. We have created several wallboards that keep track of idle time too. As a manager, knowing how much time the person was logged into the queue is helpful, but knowing how much of that time was idle during their shift, or how long it has been been since the agent handled a call is better. If you need information like the above, we can help!

Regarding your primary question "which polling strategy is better", if you can collect and report on the right data, then it does not matter... and if your staff know you are monitoring their actions, and can easily identify the cheaters, you may find just making that fact known to your staff will go a long way toward solving the problem