I’d like to set up a queue for our call center (small–5 extensions) whereby the manager gets rung the least. By “least” I mean she should only be rung if nobody else is available to take a call. How would you implement this? I know this can be accomplished with a ring group but we need other queue features.
I was thinking that we could have a main queue (consisting of all the “other” agents) and have that queue failover to the manager’s extension if nobody answers the initial queue after X minutes. Does that sound right?
You’ve pretty much answered your own question - why not just set up a queue, and have her extension as the Fail Over destination ?
If you really wanted to get fancy, you could set her extension up as a static agent in her own queue, that way, if she’s on a call, subsequent callers won’t pile into her voicemail.
It also means the callers get MOH, and you can also preen them by adding an announcement to the ‘boss queue’ advising callers that due to wait times, their call has been escalated.
You can also have other queues pointing to her queue as a fail over.
Of course, the reality is that the boss soon tires of the novelty of being the ‘catchall’, and you may well find yourself having to remove all your hard work.
Thanks for the feedback, that “chained queue” sounds like the way to go. We don’t want her VM box to be the catchall for unanswered calls, so I think we’ll make the first queue’s failover be another queue wherein she’s the only agent. Then the failover for that queue will be our general, shared VM box.
I really like the idea of letting the caller know about the escalation. Thanks again.
And yes, I originally said, “We can remove you from the queue entirely, but you could re-add yourself to it with a * code when it’s really busy.” Alas, that’s just solves the problem with too much simplicity.