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Chapter 12: Automatic Call Distribution Queues
There’s a ton of flexibility possible when designing a caller’s experience while they’re
waiting, but please don’t forget that your callers will never be happy to be waiting in
the queue. Also, if you’ve found some half-decent hold music, and your callers are
enjoying it, an interruption to play yet another message runs the risk of really setting
their blood boiling. When they are finally answered, your poor agents will get the
brunt of their anger, even though it is actually your fault.5
So keep your on-hold tweaking simple. Callers know they’re waiting, and they aren’t
going to be happy about it. Get them to an agent as quickly as possible, with the bare
minimum amount of silliness while they’re holding, and don’t succumb to the temp‐
tation of making the queue more important to your callers than it actually is.
Overflow
Unfortunately, your queue will not always get your callers to an agent in a timely
manner. When various conditions cause the queue to reject incoming callers, we have
an overflow situation. Overflowing out of the queue is done either with a timeout
value or when no queue members are available (as defined by joinempty or leavewhe
nempty). In this section we’ll discuss how to control when overflow happens.
Controlling timeouts
The Queue() application supports two kinds of timeout: one defines the maximum
period of time a caller stays in the queue, and the other specifies how long to ring a
device when attempting to connect a caller to a queue member. The two are unrelated
but can affect each other. In this section we’ll be talking about the maximum period
of time a caller stays in the Queue() application before the call overflows to the next
step in the dialplan, which could be something like VoiceMail(), or even another
queue. Once the call has fallen out of the queue, it can go anywhere that a call could
normally go when controlled by the dialplan.
The timeouts are specified in two locations. The timeout that indicates how long to
ring queue members for is specified in the queues table. The absolute timeout (how
long the caller stays in the queue) is controlled via the Queue() application. To set a
maximum amount of time for callers to stay in a queue, simply specify it after the
queue name in the Queue() application:
; Queue
exten => 610,1,Noop()
same => n,Progress()
same => n,Queue(sales,120)
same => n,Voicemail(${EXTEN}@queues,u)
same => n,Hangup()
5 Just sayin’.
Advanced Queues
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exten => 611,1,Noop()
same => n,Progress()
same => n,Queue(support,120)
same => n,Voicemail(${EXTEN}@queues,u)
same => n,Hangup()
exten => 612,1,Noop()
same => n,Progress()
same => n,Queue(support-priority,120)
same => n,Voicemail(${EXTEN}@queues,u)
same => n,Hangup()
Since we’re sending the calls to voicemail, we’ll need some mailboxes:
MySQL> INSERT INTO `asterisk`.`voicemail`
(context,mailbox,password,fullname,email)
VALUES
('queues','610','192837','Queue sales','name@shifteight.org'),
('queues','611','192837','Queue support','name@shifteight.org'),
('queues','612','192837','Queue support-priority','name@shifteight.org');
Of course, we could define a different destination, but the VoiceMail() application is
a common overflow destination for a queue. Obviously, sending callers to voicemail
is not ideal (they were hoping to speak to someone live), so make sure someone
checks it regularly and calls your customers back.
Now, let’s say we have set our absolute timeout to 10 seconds, our timeout value for
ringing queue members to 5 seconds, and our retry timeout value to 4 seconds. In
this scenario, we would ring the queue member for 5 seconds, then wait 4 seconds
before attempting another queue member. That brings us up to 9 seconds of our
absolute timeout of 10 seconds. At this point, should we ring the second queue mem‐
ber for 1 second and then exit the queue, or should we ring this member for the full 5
seconds before exiting?
We control which timeout value has priority with the timeoutpriority option in the
queues table. The available values are app (the default) and conf. If we want the appli‐
cation timeout (the absolute timeout) to take priority, which would cause our caller to
be kicked out after exactly 10 seconds (even though it was just starting to ring an
agent), we should set the timeoutpriority value to app. If we want the configuration
file timeout to take priority and finish ringing the queue member, which will cause
the caller to stay in the queue a little longer, we should set timeoutpriority to conf.