Question about Queues

Hopefully this is the right section to post this question in and hopefully some of you folks with more knowledge and experience than I have will be able to point me in the right direction.

I’ve got a business setup using Asterisk 11 with PBX 2.5 (I think 3.6.5.0 distro PiaF green) running IncrediblePBX. I’ve got 1 inbound route running to an IVR that goes to Queue 1 which points to Queue 2 which goes to Queue 3. Each Queue includes the members from the queue before it adds a few more Extensions and it basically keeps forwarding the call until someone either picks it up or it’s forwarded via misc. destination out to an answering service.

What I want to know is whether or not it’s possible to have a Queue be skipped if no Extensions are logged on to it. That way after the IVR recording if no one is logged on it will go straight to an answering service. I’m content with the setup as is but my boss is positive there’s a way to edit one of the scripts to basically go

IF Queue members = 0
Then Go to Next Queue

But I have no idea how to attempt to set that up. Any help here would be much appreciated I’ve only been working with PiaF for about a week so I’m a little out of my depth.

Cascading queues make things complicated to both manage and report on, you typically would want to put all of these calls into the same queue, and define some agent penalties, and possibly adjust your ring strategy. You may also be a good fit for the Virtual Queues Module http://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FCM/VQ+Plus-Virtual+Queues

You can find some detailed instructions and examples of penalties in the wiki: http://wiki.freepbx.org/display/F2/Queues

specifically in this document: http://literature.schmoozecom.com/queues-module/userguide/queues-module-userguide.pdf