Expanding Queue Based on Agent Availability

[pagsinc]

So my situation is this - we have our customer service reps split between "inbound" and "outbound" sales. I need to have calls come into a queue which initially tries to round robin the available "inbound" agents. When no "inbound" agents are available, I need to have it expand the agent pool to include "outbound" agents. Is there any way to do this within a single queue - or do I just need to have the first queue roll to a second one?

 

[leejor]

Since an agent logs into one Queue, you may have to have calls use the "Destination if no answer" option to "overflow" to the second queue.
https://www.3cx.com/docs/manual/call-center-queues/

 

[VoIPTools]

As leejor suggested, the overflow queue approach is the most common way to handle this. Of course, you could set SLA notifications and manually log additional agents into the queue.

There are a number of drawbacks to overflow queues, however. For example, when a caller is sent to the overflow queue the call will be counted as abandoned in 3CX reports even if the call was answered in the overflow queue. Further, if you want the "true" hold time you will need to run reports for both queues and manually add up the time the caller spent in both queues. Perhaps worse, how frustrating would it be to sit in the first queue and gradually work your way up to the first position in the queue only to be transferred to a second queue where they are now back to the 3rd position in the queue. It's a messy approach that isn't particularly nice for the customer, nor for the queue managers who are trying to get statistics.

One of these days I'm going to build an enhancement to the 3CX queue system where you designate overflow agents for a queue, then set SLA criteria and when the SLA is exceeded a service will automatically add more agents to the queue. Then once the calls fall below the SLA, the service can remove the overflow agents out of the queue. This solution will address all the ugly aspects of overflow queues, while only expanding the number of queue agents during peak demands.