Setting a Fallback Queue

Setting a Fallback Queue

As part of the agent console, agents are able to transfer an interaction to another queue. 

This might be required if another team is better equipped to deal with this customer. For example is a customer was speaking to the sales team, but were already an existing customer. In this instance, they would be better served by speaking to the customer services team. The agent handling their enquiry could transfer them to the customer services team via the queue transfer.

If the customer services team was unavailable, there is potential for this customer to be stuck in a queue where no one will answer, in which case, they will sit waiting until either waiting for a long time until an agent becomes available or until they give up and end their interaction without having their query resolved.

To handle this, our queues have a fallback option. If an interaction enters a queue, and the timeout is reached, the interaction will get redirected back to a fallback queue.

In the queue management page which can be found in the Settings submenu, you can edit a queue and add a fallback queue:

Select the required fallback queue. This queue could be a more generic queue, which many agents are a member of, or any other queue that you feel is appropriate. After this, specify, in seconds, the length of time which needs to happen before the fallback queue is triggered. 

Please note, if you have an agent timeout set to 30 seconds, and you set this to 30 seconds, the interaction would only be offered to the first available agent before the fallback timeout would redirect this interaction to the fallback queue.

The fallback timeout is optional, and if not set, the interaction will be offered to all available agents until either an agent accepts the interaction, or until all the agents are set to offline due to missing an interaction and there are no agents left to offer the interaction too.