Unified routing gives us the ability to manage the assignment of cases or tasks in a more robust and precise way, which helps teams to manage their resources efficiently and cater customer queries proficiently and smoothly. In this article lets learn about how backup queues work for a particular queue.

Business Use Case

Brands want to handle their incoming high volume calls/cases so that they can serve their customers smoothly and efficiently.

1. A brand doesn't want the customers to have their customers to wait for long times, to handle these types of scenarios they want their cross functional agents to handle these types of customers.

2. These cross functionals should be picked by the system directly whenever there is a requirement.

Admin can define a backup queue for a particular primary queue, which can be executed when there is a very high wait time for the customers in the queues.

What is a Backup Queue

Backup Queue is defined for a system when you want to transfer an agent virtually to the primary queue. Virtual transfer means an agent won't be moved to the primary queue, he will only be virtually moved to the primary queue. 

A Queue will be eligible for becoming a backup queue, only if SLA conditions are met. If these are not met then the queue won't be eligible for becoming a backup queue, that means even though the queue is added as a backup queue the agents won't be picked up from the queue.

The conditions for SLA are defined in the queue’s voice section of the General Settings Page.

​

​​

• SLA Target Time: The time in which agent and customer should get connected.

• SLA Calculation Duration: For how much time SLA should be calculated for the queue to check whether it will be eligible as a backup queue.

• Target % SLA: The threshold SLA, only if the queue SLA crosses the threshold then only it will be eligible for backup queue.

It Will help in determining whether this particular queue can act as a backup queue or not.

​Configuration

Backup Queues: For a particular queue, the backup queue can be defined in the routing configuration of the Queue. A Queue can have multiple backup queues. 

How to define a backup Queue?

1. Edit the Queue for which you want to add the backup queues.

   ​

   

   ​

2. Go to the Routing Configuration page of the Queue.

   ​

   

   ​

3. Add a routing group and define filters as per your needs

   ​

   

   ​

4. In action there will be two options in the picklist 

   Backup Queues: This can be used when you want to search for agents with skills dropped with the help of routing configuration(Required Skills)

   Backup Queues(Retain Original Skills): This can be used when you want to search for agents with no skills dropped(Original Required Skills).

Examples

A client has two Queue A and Queue B. Queue A consists of Agents A1 and A2. Queue B consists of Agent B1 and B2.

Queue B is the backup queue of Queue A.

Queue A is the backup Queue of Queue B.
Conditions for SLA are as following:

SLA Target Time: 20 sec

SLA Calculation duration: 15min

Target SLA: 85%

Queue A current SLA for the last 15 min is 70%

Queue B current SLA for the last 15 min is 96%.

Hence, Queue B is eligible for becoming a backup queue. Queue A is not eligible for becoming a backup queue.

When there is volume in Queue A, 

Since Queue B is eligible to act as a backup queue, the agents will be virtually moved from Queue B to Queue A till the time of necessity.

So,It will be shown in the reporting as follows,

Agent B1 from Queue A was taking a call landed in Queue A.