Working on this for a small business…they only have a few agents, and they aren’t always available. Right now their queues announce the option to leave a voicemail, but I feel this is borderline unprofessional and dingy feeling.
Obviously having staff in at the exact time the Time Conditions establish the business is open is ideal, but with only a few agents, it slips by. Adding another person or mandating people show up at exact hours isn’t an option they can do at this time. Or other times, 2-3 agents will be left in the office, and they go on a coffee break together.
I’m trying to figure out if I can configure Queue Callback to establish a call as soon as an agent logs in.
For example:
Business opens, labor staff begin working, but phone agents are not available yet
Customer calls in, sits on hold patiently
Callback option is presented, customer ops in
Agent comes into office and logs in
Callback is established and agent is connected with customer
Any ideas on how to do this, or another solution around it? Right now, if a customer calls in, they’d be first in line, so the callback would initiate immediately. But there’d be no agent, and they’d sit on hold, first in line.
That’s what I was referring to…but wouldn’t it just call the person right back as they’d already be at the front of the queue (but no agents are available to take it)?
The Queue Breakout allows you to use an IVR with single digit entries (so 0-9). When the breakout is presented it plays the greeting for that IVR presenting them with options like “Press 1 to leave a voicemail. Press 2 for a call back without losing your place in the queue”. If they don’t respond, the Queue’s MoH and other timed announcements will continue on. So they actually never leave the Queue.
That’s now how Queues work. You either have a breakout option or your don’t have a breakout option. There is no minimum or maximum limit of members before the Breakout can happen. It just is there regardless of how many callers or Agents are in the queue.
@bigmillz You would need to do the Breakout that would take their information, store it (like get their call back number) You can playback their CallerID Number and ask if that is where they want the call back or if they want to use a different number. Either way you need to take that information and store it. You need to take that call and create a Local channel for that call and push it into the Queue based on the users position when they left the queue. When the an agent logs they are sent the call via the Local channel and when they answer the Local Channel sends them to a context that will call the user back and connect them to the agent.
You either need to invest in the Commercial module(s) for this or write your own.
The Queue Breakout allows you to use an IVR with single digit entries (so 0-9). When the breakout is presented it plays the greeting for that IVR presenting them with options like “Press 1 to leave a voicemail. Press 2 for a call back without losing your place in the queue”. If they don’t respond, the Queue’s MoH and other timed announcements will continue on. So they actually never leave the Queue.
To clarify, the custom context is still a viable option, even off an IVR. You could have the IVR be silent with a timeout behavior of going to the context immediately. The context could decide between sending them to a virtual queue or sending them into the queue callback process. It wasn’t so much the answer as an method for coming up with an answer based on their unique requirements.
BlazeStudios That’s now how Queues work. You either have a breakout option or your don’t have a breakout option. There is no minimum or maximum limit of members before the Breakout can happen. It just is there regardless of how many callers or Agents are in the queue.
That’s not how queues work today, thus a feature request could be an appropriate way escalate the desire for new functionality/behavior.
Regardless, I do agree with @BlazeStudios in that you will most likely need to pay or do it yourself to get this functionality in the near term.
So the Breakout IVR is a limited scope IVR in regards that the Queue will playback the IVR Greeting and wait for an option to be selected. It does not “timeout” and send them somewhere else, it keeps them in the Queue. Honoring a timeout would make it so if they didn’t press an option they would be removed from the Queue, which is not what the caller wanted since they didn’t select ANY options to LEAVE the queue when presented.
Again, the Breakout IVR will only remove the caller from the Queue if they select an option otherwise it keeps them in the Queue at their position. That’s the point of the Breakout IVR is to allow the caller to leave the Queue without having to hang up and call back in to go to some other option in the system. If this was a viable method to get to the solution, I would have suggested it.
Sure, however, Queues are an Asterisk thing and this would require the Queues app to be re-worked. So at this point you’re looking at Asterisk 17 before this is even a viable option. Asterisk 16 is being released towards the middle of this month and will be LTS. So no feature requests or updates will be added to it. That also takes into consideration the feature request would even be accepted and worked.