Calling Queues. Digium Asterisk Appliance 50 AA50, AA50

Chapter 3: Telephone System Configuration

Calling Queues

A call queue lines up callers and allows them to wait to speak to any group of employees taking a high volume of calls. The feature allows you to speak to more people rather than send callers back to voice mail to leave a message and receive a call back when time permits.

Asterisk identifies which extensions under the Users tab are capable of belonging to a call queue by whether the Is Agent option is selected. The

Is Agent indicates that the user is available to answer customer calls. If a check mark does not appear next to Is Agent, that extension won’t appear in the list of agents in the configuration for this option. The following illustration shows the Queue Extension Configuration window displaying the available options.

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Figure 10: Call Queues

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Chapter 3: Telephone System Configuration

The Queues section lists the existing queues. Existing queues are in black. To create a new queue, click New below the queue listing. Use the following steps to create a queue. Keep in mind the purpose of the queue and how it should operate.

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Creating a Queue

The extension for the queue will automatically populate in the Queue field with the next available extension. If you want the number to be something other than the automatically chosen one, enter it in the

Queue field.

Next, give the queue a name that will be meaningful. The queue will be referenced by this name, so be sure to make it sufficiently descriptive as well. For example, “Technical Support” for the technical support queue, “Sales”, and so on.

You now should choose the strategy used in your queue call logic.

Using the Strategy drop-down list, choose one of the following options for routing calls:

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Ring All - Rings every agent who isn’t on an active call when a new call arrives. The first agent to answer the call receives it.

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Round Robin - Every available agent receives a call in turn, akin to how cards are dealt in a poker game.

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Least Recent - The agent who has been without a call the longest receives the next call.

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Fewest Calls - The agent who has handled the fewest calls receives the next incoming call.

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Random - Goes by the luck of the draw; any agent can receive the next incoming call.

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RrMemory - This option is Round Robin with Memory. It’s similar to Round Robin, but smarter — it remembers over the course of days, weeks, or years which agent received the last call so that it can commence with the next agent in sequence when calls begin again.

The Agents box lists all Users that are designated as an agent that can receive calls as part of a call queue. All users listed have the Is Agent checkbox selected on their user profile. Many Users may be listed as potential agents, but some may be assigned to a sales queue and some for a service queue. This box lists all agents and enables you to choose which users you assign to the queue.

The options available in the Queue Options section control the timing and managing of the calls as well as the agents. You may not want to work with these finer points of call queuing until after your call queue has been working for a while and you have an idea of call volume and the turnover of calls by each agent. Here’s a list of the available options:

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Timeout - The default for this option is 15, representing 15 seconds that an agent’s phone will ring before the call is forwarded on to another agent.

Wrapup Time - This is a buffer of time allowing your agents to finish work on one call and remain unavailable in the queue. The default on this option is 0 seconds, providing no buffer time for your agents and allowing the next call to ring through immediately after a call is complete.

Max Len - This option sets the maximum number of callers allowed in the queue before they are sent to voice mail or receive a busy signal.

The default is “0,” which allows for an unlimited number of calls in queue before they are sent elsewhere.

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Music on Hold - This option gives you the ability to select the music played while a call is on hold.

Auto Fill - This option is enabled by default and allows multiple calls that arrive at the same time to be immediately forwarded on to agents.

Auto Pause - If an agent fails to answer a call, this option temporarily postpones sending calls to that agent.

Join Empty - This option allows callers to enter a queue even if no agents are logged into it. If this option is not checked, callers cannot enter a queue until at least one agent is present.

Leave When Empty - This option mirrors the Join Empty, but it represents a queue in which agents had been logged in but are now gone.

At 5:00 pm, when your employees go home, you can program the queue to shut down when the agents log out. The existing callers in queue are forced to exit, and no new callers are granted access to the queue.

Report Hold Time - The Report Hold Time tells the agent how long the call was holding in queue before it was sent to the agent. If the hold time was short, the agent will probably be happy to accept the call. If the hold time was 10, 15, or 20 minutes, the agent might want to brace for a frustrated customer, but at least the agent isn’t overwhelmed.

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