Queues and Agents

Is it possible to somehow define which agents should get most of the calls waiting in queue, and which not. For example: I would like the experienced agents to answer as many calls in queue as they can, and newbies only those that cannot be answered by the experienced ones at that very moment .

Is this possible & how?

What you want to do is route based on an agents skill level. With Asterisk, there isn’t an easy way to assign a skill level to each agent (yet) based on their ability, but what you can do is set up 2 (or more) queues, with your top agents logging into the first queue, and your less experienced agents going into the second queue.

Calls coming into your center would target your primary queue, and your experienced agents would get the calls. If they are all busy, the calls would spill into your second queue with your lesser experienced agents and they can take the calls.

Thanks.

So, does that mean that the calls that were spilled to the second queue, stay there, or is there a way that the first waiting call of the second queue gets transfered to the first queue, if one of the experienced agents gets free?

Yes, they will stay in the second queue.

There are a couple of things you might be able to do here that I can think of, perhaps others reading might have some other suggestions.

A)
You could make your experienced agents log into both queues. So experienced agents login to both queue 1 & 2, and in-experienced agents just logon to queue 2. This way, calls that do spill into the second queue get targeted to both experienced and inexperienced agents.

B)
You could also ‘spill’ queue 2 back into Queue1, but this is something that could lead to callers being bounced back and forth quite a bit and there’s no real easy way ‘out’ of the queue

this should be easy. In queues.conf, when you define the agents and channels in each queue, define penalties. just put ,1 ,2 etc after each channel or agent is defined, so someone with penalty 1 won’t get a call until everybody without a penalty is busy, penalty 2 won’t get called until 0 and 1 are busy, etc

Oh wow, thats a great tip!! Thanks for sharing that one!

In practice, I haven’t seen priorities with queues work properly. If you assign a priority 1 to an agent in a queue, that agent always gets the calls , even if other agents are logged in and available. Good luck getting it to work!