Table of Contents
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), or call queuing, provides a way for a PBX to queue up incoming calls from a group of users: it aggregates multiple calls into a holding pattern and assigns each call a rank that determines the order in which that call should be delivered to an available agent (typically, first in first out). When an agent becomes available, the highest-ranked caller in the queue is delivered to that agent, and everyone else moves up a rank.
If you have ever called an organization and heard “all of our representatives are busy,” you have experienced ACD. The advantage of ACD to the callers is that they don’t have to keep dialing back in an attempt to reach someone, and the advantages to the organizations are that they are able to better service their customers and to temporarily handle situations where there are more callers than there are agents.[126]
There are two types of call centers: inbound and outbound. ACD refers to the technology that handles inbound call centers, whereas the term Predictive Dialer refers to the technology that handles outbound call centers. In this book we will primarily focus on inbound calling.
We’ve all been frustrated by poorly designed and managed queues: enduring hold music from a radio that isn’t in tune, mind-numbing wait times, and pointless messages that tell you every 20 seconds how important your call is, despite that fact that you’ve been waiting for 30 minutes and have heard the message so many times you can quote it from memory. From a customer service perspective, queue design may be one of the most important aspects of your telephone system. As with an automated attendant, what must be kept in mind above all else is that your callers are not interested in holding in a queue. They called because they want to talk to you. All your design decisions must keep this crucial fact front-and-center in your mind: people want to talk to other people; not to your phone system.[127]
The purpose of this chapter is to teach you how to create and design queues that get callers to their intended destinations as quickly and painlessly as possible.
In this chapter, we may flip back and forth
between the usage of the terms queue
members and agents. Unless we are talking about agents logged in via chan_agent (using AgentLogin()), we’re almost certainly talking
about queue members as added via AddQueueMember() or the CLI commands (which
we’ll discuss in this chapter). Just know that there is a difference in
Asterisk between an agent and a queue
member, but that we’ll use the term agent
loosely to simply describe an endpoint as called by a Queue().
[126] It is a common misconception that a queue can allow you to handle more calls. This is not strictly true, in that your callers will still want to speak to a live person, and they will only be willing to wait for so long. In other words, if you are short-staffed, your queue could end up being nothing more than an obstacle to your callers. The ideal queue is invisible to the callers, since their calls get answered immediately without them having to hold.
[127] There are several books available that discuss call center metrics and available queuing strategies, such as James C. Abbott’s The Executive Guide to Call Center Metrics (Robert Houston Smith).