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CHAPTER 12
Automatic Call Distribution Queues
An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.
—George Mikes
Automatic call distribution (ACD), or call queuing, provides a way for a PBX to
queue up incoming calls from a group of users. It aggregates multiple calls into a
holding pattern, assigns each call a rank, and determines the order in which that call
should be delivered to an available agent (typically, first in first out). When an agent
becomes available, the highest-ranked caller in the queue is delivered to that agent,
and everyone else moves up a rank.
If you have ever called an organization and heard “all of our representatives are busy,”
you have experienced ACD. The advantage of ACD to the callers is that they don’t
have to keep dialing back in an attempt to reach someone, and the advantages to the
organizations are that they are able to better serve their customers and to temporarily
handle situations where there are more callers than there are agents.1
There are two types of call centers: inbound and outbound. ACD
refers to the technology that handles inbound call centers, whereas
the term Dialer (or Predictive Dialer) refers to the technology that
handles outbound call centers. In this book we will primarily focus
on inbound calling.
1 It is a common misconception that a queue can allow you to handle more calls. This is not strictly true: your
callers will still want to speak to a live person, and they will only be willing to wait for so long. In other words,
if you are short-staffed, your queue could end up being nothing more than an obstacle to your callers. This is
the same whether you’re on the phone or at the Walmart checkout. Nobody likes to wait in line. The ideal
queue is invisible to the callers, since their calls get answered immediately without them having to wait.
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We’ve all been frustrated by poorly designed and managed queues: enduring hold
music from a radio that isn’t in tune, mind-numbing wait times, and pointless mes‐
sages that tell you every 20 seconds how important your call is, despite that fact that
you’ve been waiting for 30 minutes and have heard the message so many times you
can quote it from memory. From a customer service perspective, queue design may
be one of the most important aspects of your telephone system. As with an automated
attendant, what must be kept in mind above all else is that your callers are not interes‐
ted in holding in a queue. They called because they want to talk to you. All your design
decisions must keep this crucial fact front-and-center in your mind: people want to
talk to other people, not to your phone system.2
The purpose of this chapter is to teach you how to create and design queues that get
callers to their intended destinations as quickly and painlessly as possible.
In this chapter, we may flip back and forth between the usage of the
terms queue members and agents. Since we’re not going to spend
much time on the Asterisk module named chan_agent (using
AgentLogin()), we need to make it clear that in this book, when we
use the term agent, we’re referring to an endpoint—a human being,
and not the channel technology in Asterisk named chan_agent.
Read on, and this should make more sense.
Creating a Simple ACD Queue
To start with, we’re going to create a simple ACD queue. It will accept callers and
attempt to deliver them to a member of the queue.
In Asterisk, the term member refers to a channel (typically a SIP
peer) assigned to a queue that can be dialed, such as SIP/
0000FFFF0001. An agent technically refers to the Agent channel
also used for dialing endpoints. Unfortunately, the Agent channel is
a deprecated technology in Asterisk, as it is limited in flexibility
and can cause unexpected issues that can be hard to diagnose and
resolve. We will not be covering the use of chan_agent, so be aware
that we will generally use the term member to refer to the telephone
device and agent to refer to the person who handles the call. Since
one isn’t generally effective without the other, either term may refer
to both.
2 There are several books available that discuss call center metrics and available queuing strategies, such as
James C. Abbott’s The Executive Guide to Call Center Metrics (Robert Houston Smith).
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Chapter 12: Automatic Call Distribution Queues
We’ll create the queue(s) in the queues.conf file, and manually add queue members to
it through the Asterisk console. In the section “Queue Members” on page 215, we’ll
look into how to create a dialplan that allows us to dynamically add and remove
queue members (as well as pause and unpause them).
The first step is to create an empty agents.conf file in your /etc/asterisk configuration
directory. We will not use or edit this file, but the app_queue module expects to find
it, and will not load if it does not exist:
$ cd /etc/asterisk
$ sudo -u asterisk touch agents.conf