Ring Group

General Help
1

Hi
I have freepbx running at the moment but i am having a problem with queues.
So i have 3 Extensions/agents in the queue with ringall which works fine and 3 extensions ring on incoming call.
Scenario…
Only 1 agent
2 incoming calls
agent answers first call while second keeps ringing
agent finishes first call but second call does not ring the agent.
second call keeps ringing at other extensions and the only way to answer is to physically go to second phone.
Is this normal behavior ?
I have checked the agent timing settings and general queue and just wanted to clarify the options i have set.

Queue … (only relevant parts) …
ring=ringall
skip busy = yes

timing and agent … (only relevant parts)…
agent timeout=1min
agent timeout restart=no
retry=5secs
wrap up time = 0
member delay=0
auto pause no no no delay = 0

no announcements

using grandstream phones.

Any ideas ? i think i might have incorrect option set but have tried many combinations.

Maybe someone could suggest the correct options for a queue.

Thanks in advance

2

The best answer is to tell your people to get out of the queue when they are going to be away from their phones. That’s kind of the point of queues.

As long as the other agent’s phones are ringing, the call is dedicated to that phone. It won’t relinquish the call except to send it to voice mail.

Now, you should be able to do a directed call pickup (on my system, it’s ** and the extension) and pick the call up from the ringing phone, but there are other things in the configuration that have to be ready for that to work.

3

Hi
Thanks for the quick reply…
So what you are saying is that this is normal behaviour for the queues !!!
I expected that when the agent hangs up the first call they are “available” again and the phone would ring again with the second call.
Sometimes the agents are away from phone only for a short time like a min so they dont leave/join the queue every time.
Is there a better way to setup the queues so the second call will ring when the agent is free ? The problem is that we have 6 lines and only 3 queue operators and i have only outlined the problem when 2 calls come in but with 4 calls the problem is worse and sometimes no phones ring when calls are in the queue.
How can this be solved ? This does not seem normal. Maybe I have not got the right thinking of how to approach this with queues.
Thanks

4

They would be, but the call has already been handed off to the other two phones. At this point, there isn’t a second call anymore, unless the call drops back into the queue to be handled.

Huh? If they are away from their phone, they aren’t available to take a call - why would you make people sit and wait for an agent that isn’t there?

I’m trying to remember exactly how the calls are handled. It seems to me that if an agent is available, the call is dropped straight onto that phone without dropping into the waiting queue. If there are no agents, they drop into the “You’re first in line…” process. That queue checks for new agents becoming available every “timeout” period (which you said was 1 minute) and if an agent (or agents) are available, the call is sent to the phone(s) that are available based on the ring type (you said ringall).

I don’t know what to tell you. It sounds like everything is working the way I’d expect it to. In our call-center, if an agent is off the phone (even for a minute) we pull them out of the queue and when they come back and are ready to work, they log back in. It’s three buttons - one if you set up a button on the phone to do it for them. Having “available agents” that aren’t available isn’t something that Asterisk can predict. The only thing I can suggest is adding some code that check to see how many times a phone has rung and pull those people out of the queue.

You said your recheck time is set to 1 minute - you might want to roll that back to 15 seconds. That way, the queue will be queried at quarter minute intervals and your calls should drop onto the phones quicker.

Seriously though, you can’t have agents standing around the water cooler while their phones ring. It’s just not professional, especially when two out of three agents are away from the queue while the phones are ringing.

5

hi
Ok so this isnt a call centre its just a small office with 2 reception staff. They arrive at work and join the queue so they get calls.
Customers also arrive at the counter. So 1 operator is left in the main office.
Its too much for the staff to login/logout every time they leave their desk and because the older keyphone system allowed them to hangup one call and the next would ring they are looking for the same functions.

You mentioned recheck time… I never posted a recheck time but from the information I posted I assume you mean the agent timeout = 1min. You said to reduce that to 15 seconds but if I follow your logic then setting this to 0 or 1 second should make the calls arrive with little delay.
Is this this the way the agent timeout works because thats not how the wiki describes that feature but maybe thats the part i’m reading wrong.
Thanks for your helpful information.

6

You don’t want to overburden the system by checking this every couple of seconds. Honestly, the difference between 5 and 15 is huge from the customer’s perspective, but remember that, at 15, the average wait time is going to be about 8 seconds. Anything less than 5 is probably too much.

One more thing - while the phone is ringing, it isn’t in the queue any more. It’s been allocated to a phone. The “joining” of the call to the phones happens once at the beginning. I think there’s a setting for the ringing to expire and drop back into the queue (to allow the phones to be checked for busy), but that gives the customer the experience of “ringing, wait in queue, ringing, back to queue, ringing, back to queue”. I don’t think there’s a perfect solution using either a queue or a ring group.

Perhaps it’s time to explore a different model.

Set up all three phones in a call pickup group and put them into a ring-group. When the phones start to ring, the one person that’s actually doing their job can get off the phone and press “call pickup” and answer the ringing phone.

This solution is just as bad as the other, but easier for you to implement.

From a customer satisfaction perspective, the best solution is to implement the method you are using right now, but add a button the phone to log them into and out of the queue. This way, you allow the customer to do things like divert themselves to voicemail, or press a “special code” that drops them onto a high priority queue. The problem, though, seems to be that your customer wants their key-system back. There are some things that Asterisk can’t do, but there are lots of things it can do that your customer hasn’t explored.

Another approach is to not have them sign in and out, but use time-conditions instead. At 09:00 (or when the second one arrives) you can press “Day Mode” and the phones just ring. If all the phones are in the same pickup group, a simple star-code (programmed into the buttons on the phone) can be used to pick up whatever phone is ringing anywhere in the network.

Most of the places that I’ve set up phones for that weren’t call centers use this model. The only thing that’s the least bit tricky is the call pickup code, and that can be easily handled either through a configuration in EPM or by you managing the phone configs by hand (for less than 5 phones, by hand should work

7

Instead of using “ring all”. Try “rrmemory”