Webex Contact Center Queue Overflow with Cascading Teams and Skill Relaxation
When a customer contacts a company through one of these channels and needs to be handled by a live agent, the interaction is typically routed to a queue where it waits to be handled by an available agent. These queues can be configured with specific rules and parameters, such as priority levels, maximum wait times, and routed to agents based on skills like language or expertise, to ensure that customers are served in a timely and efficient manner.
Agents and supervisors can also access real-time data and analytics about the queue like the number of waiting customers, average wait times and service level performance to help them manage their workload and prioritize their tasks. This can improve overall customer satisfaction and help businesses deliver better customer experiences.
Creating a Queue:
The queue is this where the customer waits before the system assigns the customer to an agent. There are three section to the queue configuration. General settings are where you name the queue and set the channel type for the queue.
Next take a look at contact routing settings. This where an administrator can decide the order in which agents are assigned calls. This can be based on the longest available agent, or if you are building a skill based queue, the best available agent. Finally you can add the team of agents associated to the queue in Group 1. A team is a group of agents that the call is queued to.
This process is designed to ensure that customer requests are handled as quickly and efficiently as possible, while also reducing the burden on individual agents by distributing the workload across multiple teams.
The third section offers advanced settings involving call monitoring, recording and maximum time in queue, it’s recommended to keep the maximum time in queue to a reasonable limit to prevent customers from disconnecting while they are still waiting, but also protect you against hung or stale calls. It’s also important to note service level threshold which refers to the level of service that the system aims to achieve in terms of answering customer calls within a certain timeframe. The service level threshold is typically defined as a percentage of calls that should be answered within a specified time, such as 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds.
Queue Overflows
Once a queue is created, add some functionality to help with call volume should agents need assistants. This usually involves bringing in another team such as supervisors that normally wouldn’t take calls or a group of agents where this queue’s function isn’t their priority. This feature is known as team cascading or overflow.
Team Cascading
Webex Contact Center team cascading is a method that allows the contact center to automatically distribute incoming customer interactions to teams of agents in a hierarchical manner, based on team membership. With team cascading, interactions are first routed to the primary group or teams that are best suited to handle the specific customer request. If all agents in the primary group are busy, the second group of teams are added to the queue at a set interval so the interaction automatically becomes available for the secondary team, and so on until it reaches a team with available agents.
In order to implement team cascading let’s take a look at the contact routing settings again and instead of just one team, let’s add a second group consisting of a supervisors team and give a set time when calls will be routed to team two.
When designing call flows we often perform checks to make sure that agents are logged into the queue so that we don’t leave a call queue after all the agents have logged off for the day. We can use the “Get Queue Info” to get the number of logged in agents associated with the queue. Here we have two options: GetQueueInfo.LoggedOnAgentsAll and GetQueueInfo.LoggedOnAgentsCurrent.
GetQueueInfo.LoggedOnAgentsAll will give us the count of logged in agents associated with the queue. will give us the count of logged in agents in the current queue group. To understand the difference in these options, lets assume we have a caller in queue for 10seconds, no one in our agent team was logged in, and one supervisor logged in. GetQueueInfo.LoggedOnAgentsCurrent would return 0, but GetQueueInfo.LoggedOnAgentsAll would return 1. If the call waited for 130 seconds when the second group was added to the queue, then both values would be 1
Skill Relaxation
Changes to queues can also be based on the skill level of the agent. If one agent for example speaks another language the call may receive a call first based on that skill. Before setting up a skill queue in flow designer, we need to create the skill definition and skill profile, and then assign the profile to the agent. For example, our skill definition would be named “answer tier” then service threshold(20), type(proficiency), then mark the definition as active. Proficiency lets us rank the agent from 0-10 based on their abilities.
Skill Profiles are then created to set the skills and skill values. Here we will select the skill and set the skill value set at 10 for agents and supervisors can have a skill value of 5.
Next we can use the flow designer’s QueueContact activity to specify the skill requirement level and then set our skill relaxation at 12o seconds.
When the caller is queued, Webex will look for an agent with a skill level being at least 10. Then after 120 seconds if the caller is still waiting Webex will reduce that requirement to 5 which will also include our supervisors to take the call.
In order to track agents and stats within a skill queue, we can use the “Advance Queue Info” activity. This lets us select the queue and also set skill requirements to track stuff like logged in agents and position in queue.
Overall, Webex Contact Center team cascading can help businesses deliver better customer experiences by improving response times, reducing wait times, and increasing agent productivity.