Companies with teams answering incoming calls want to make their workforce as efficient as possible and to offer great customer service. Universe now offers a wider range of options to allow companies to change the order in which their agents receive calls. Is it the agent who has been idle the longest who is the first to get the next call, or the one with the most experience, or perhaps all the phones should ring at once?

It also gives the ability for VIP customers to go to the front of the queue.

This new functionality will work with desk phones, softphones and mobile phones used by agents that are part of call groups in queues linked to Universe IVRs.

Priority Groups

It is possible to set priority groups of agents within various functions. So for example there may be a team offering customer service that has two priority groups. In Universe, when all agents are busy on calls in priority group 1, additional calls will immediately go to priority group 2 to serve customers.

Ring Strategies

Universe used to have three queue options; Ring All, Round Robin and Random Now it has an additional four; Top-Down, Longest Idle, Fewest Calls and VIP

Ring All

A call is made to an IVR phone number and all phones ring simultaneously for available agents of the relevant agent group. The first agent to answer the phone will take the call.

Top Down

Agents are placed in a defined order and the call will be offered to agents one at a time, depending on their availability. It will always attempt to locate the agent in the highest position who is able receive a call. If the first agent is busy, or unavailable, the call will be offered to the second agent, and so on. If an agent is available but does not answer the phone after a period of time, the call will be transferred to the next agent.

Round Robin

This is similar to Top Down but shifts its starting point by one agent in a defined order for each incoming call. Any agent who is not capable of receiving a call will just be skipped over and the next agent will be offered the call.

Longest Idle

This ring strategy will always attempt to select the agent with the longest “idle” time first. An agent will be tagged as “idle” if he is able to take a call but has not had calls offered to them. It does not include time away from their desk.

Fewest Calls

This ring strategy is virtually identical to the , however, the attribute used to order the agents is the number of calls answered over a certain time period. The agent with the lowest number of calls over a period of time will be in the first position. The more calls taken, the further down the list the agent’s position will be.

Random

A call enters a queue and is sent to an available agent on a random basis. It does not have a predetermined order as do the other ring strategies such as Top Down.

VIP

Where a customer has been flagged as a VIP customer in the company’s Universe database, they will go to the front of the queue to be the next call answered on all of the above call answering options. Those in the queue will not be aware that their announced position in the queue has been altered (even though it has).

Installing and Using the new queuing function.

Universe Update 5 explains how to install and use the different Priority Groups and Ring Strategies