6.3 Queues

Overview

In this section, you will learn how to configure and manage a queue service.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), or call queuing, provides a way for a telephony system to queue up incoming calls, internal and/or external. The ACD 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 member (typically, first in first out). When a member becomes available, the highest-ranked call in the queue is delivered to that member, and everyone else in the queue moves up a rank.

The advantage of ACD to the callers is that they don’t have to keep dialling back trying to reach someone, and the advantages to the organisations are that they are able to better service their customers and to temporarily handle situations where there are more callers than there are people available to answer the calls.

While there are two types of queues (inbound and outbound) that can be configured on the DFN Telephone System, we will mainly concentrate on the inbound queue in this section.

There are two types of queues on the DFN cloud telephone system:

  • Inbound queues

  • Outbound queues

An inbound queue is when the telephone system routes incoming calls to queue members who are shown as ready (or open), in a pre-programmed sequence. In contrast, an outbound queue is formed merely to collect the outbound call statistics for the queue members, to generate call analytics information. The outbound queue doesn’t route or distribute calls in any way.

Members are phone extensions which can join or leave a queue using the methods listed below, without supervisory control or pre-approval:

  • Dialling a star code from their phone extension

  • Using the XML menu on a device (on certified devices and if supported)

  • DFN VoIP Centrex app.

In this view, you can:

  • Add a new entry

  • Select one, several or all entries and delete them

  • Edit, clone, delete or edit an entry or copy it to a clipboard (you can also edit an entry by double-clicking on it)

  • Select how many entries you want to have on the page

  • Search for a queue

TIP

You have the option of cloning a queue if you want to duplicate the queue with the same or similar settings.