Callers Stuck in Wait Queue Even Thought Agents are Available

  • 19 February 2021
  • 5 replies
  • 761 views

I’m curious if anyone has struggled with callers getting stuck in the wait queue, even though there are available agents. Here’s my situation:

  1. Call comes into IVR; callers presses 2 to talk to agent
  2. Rings to all available agents (2-4 logged in at a time) for :60.
  3. If agents are available but don’t answer (because they’re working on another ticket), go to Rollover Call Queue
  4. Play Wait Queue Message, append position to wait message
    1. Problem: The call only rings back to agents in a new call comes into the queue or if the agent moves into the “available” status. 
    2. If the agents finish their other ticket and can now take a call, they call may not ever ring to them again, meaning the caller is just stuck in the queue until the max time. 

How do others handle this? Do you require your agents to stop working on calls and take the ticket? Do you separate duties so phone agents are never distracted by other tickets? Do you have agents flip their availability on and off to trigger the phone to ring again? 

 

Thanks for your help!

 


5 replies

Badge +6

Hey Stevens,

Thanks for bringing this up!

 

We’ve been working on wait queue enhancements and supervisors can soon assign calls from the Live dashboard. This will go live by the first week of March 2021. 

 

As per the current scenario, once agents are available to take calls after addressing the tickets, calls will ring to them again if they change their status from ‘Offline’ back to ‘Available.’ However, this could be a little annoying to do every time, and hence we’re coming up with the feature - ‘Assign calls from Live Dashboard.’ With this, supervisors can assign calls from the live dashboard if there are callers waiting in the queue and if there are available agents online. Once this is enabled, supervisors can:

  1. Manually assign a call to an agent belonging to the same queue. Example: If an agent belongs to the Support queue and if there is a caller waiting in the Support queue, they can assign a call to them.
  2. Move any call to the top of the queue if there are multiple calls in the same queue. Movement can only happen within a queue but not between the queues.
  3. If all the agents are busy, and if callers are waiting in the queue, supervisors can pick up the call and speak to the customer.

Hope this answers your question.

Thanks,

Subhikshaa

Userlevel 2
Badge +7

Hey Stevens,

Assigning calls from live dashboard feature is live.

Let us know your thoughts when you have a chance to check it out.

Badge

Hi Subhikshaa,

sorry to say, but the idea that a supervisor continuously has to monitor the queue is complete bullshit.

The best thing would be that the agent would not be able to “ignore” a call when they are available.
In each call center I worked before (three, to be exact), it was common that the agent gets a whisper and then the call is connected.

Best,
David

Userlevel 2
Badge +7

Hello David,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

We have the ability to remove the ignore button for the agents from our end. Is this something you’d be interested in?

Userlevel 1
Badge

Hello Community Manager

Think David is referring to Forced/Auto answer., which is a feature that system doesn't have today. Since the system will not change the agent state to Offline as they missed a call,  its added work for the supervisor to assign calls to agents (which btw is what the system should do) and to keep monitoring agent state.  

We are having similar issue, in our case the agents cherry pick the call they want to answer.. wouldnt have been possible if Forced/Auto Answer was available.

Regards

ART

Reply