Workflow: Using queues in omnichannel routing to overflow calls to other groups

What's my plan?

This article assumes omnichannel routing has been turned on for your account. See Turning on omnichannel routing and Managing your omnichannel routing configuration.

In some cases, you might want to route calls to certain agents, but need to have the routing logic to "overflow" to alternative agents if none of the preferred agents are available. Omnichannel routing queues are designed to provide more granular routing logic and consistent ways to route work to multiple groups of agents.

This recipe uses omnichannel routing, groups, and queues.

This example includes:

• Workflow goal
• Creating groups of agents to handle different types of insurance inquiries
• Defining the queues

Workflow goal

Your company uses separate phone lines for each type of insurance they offer, such as a dedicated line for health insurance inquiries. They want to route all calls received on the health insurance phone number to the Health Insurance Division group of agents, but use the General Insurance Division group of agents as backup when the health insurance division agents aren't available. Now that omnichannel routing supports the creation of custom queues and routing work to both primary and secondary groups of agents, you've been tasked with updating your omnichannel routing settings to accomplish this.

Using omnichannel routing for calls

Before deciding how to route calls, it's important to understand the ticket creation process. When you use omnichannel routing, a ticket is created for the call as soon as it is received. That means you can run triggers on incoming calls before it is answered. If you choose not to use omnichannel routing, tickets are created for calls after the call is answered by an agent, and triggers can't be run against the incoming calls until the ticket is created. That means omnichannel routing is the only way you can use triggers to influence call routing.

When using custom queues, triggers fire on new calls before omnichannel routing evaluates the queues.

See How omnichannel routing works.

Creating groups of agents to handle different types of insurance inquiries

Groups collect agents together, allowing admins to manage agent ticket assignments based on an agent's skills, experience, or other similarities.

To create the groups

1. In Admin Center, click People in the sidebar, then select Team > Groups.
2. Click Add group.
3. Enter a group name. In this example, we'll use Health Insurance Division.
4. Select the agents you want to add to the group.
5. Click Save.
6. Repeat steps 2–5 to create another group named General Insurance Division.
7. Create a process, such as a trigger, to assign calls from the health insurance phone number to the new group.

Defining the queues

Tickets, including calls, are assigned to queues based on the queue's conditions. Conditions are the qualifications needed for a ticket to be added to the queue.

Tip: If you use IVR, you can create queue conditions based on the tags added by IVR. See Using IVR with omnichannel routing.

To define the queues

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Omnichannel routing > Queues.
2. Click Create queue.
3. Enter a Name for the queue. For this example, we'll use: Health insurance requests.
4. Specify the queue's Priority relative to other queues.

   Queue priority is only considered when an agent receives work from multiple queues. In that case, work from the queue with the higher priority is assigned first. You can use the same priority value for more than one queue.

5. Under Conditions, specify the conditions under which you want the skill to be added. For example:
   • Ticket > Channel > Is > Phone call (incoming)
   • Ticket > Comment text > Contains at least one of the following words > Call to: [phone]
6. For Primary group, select Health Insurance Division.
7. For Secondary groups, select General Insurance Division.
8. Click Save.
9. On the Queues page, drag and drop the queues into your preferred order.

   Omnichannel routing evaluates the queues in the order they are listed on the Queues page and inserts tickets into the first queue they match the conditions for.

When you use the configurations described in this article, calls received on the health insurance line ([phone]) are inserted into the Health insurance requests queue based on the call's priority and ticket creation timestamp. Then, the call is routed to an available agent in the Health Insurance Division group. If all agents in the Health Insurance Division group are unavailable, the call overflows to the secondary group (General Insurance Division) for a faster response.