Voice: Skilled Routing

Queue Announcements Best Practices

• Estimated Wait Time is more accurate with increased amounts of call data. If your call volume is low, your agent count is low, and/or your average call length varies greatly, then the estimated wait time is less accurate based on the data it is provided. We encourage you to not use this announcement if those scenarios are met.
• If alerting the caller that they will be recorded, the best practice is to ensure the notification is played prior to transferring the caller into a skill group. That way the announcement can be heard in its entirety before an agent has the ability to answer.

Overflow Best Practices

• If your intent is to introduce more agents to assist with calls that have been in the queue for a set duration, the best practice is to use Availability Tiers instead of overflowing to an additional skill. Keeping the call in the same queue provides better reporting and also allows you to still use “position in queue” and “estimated wait time” announcements in the skill.
• When using skill overflows, the best practice is to set a Check Overflow Frequency duration. This will re-check the rule, and if agents have become unavailable or logged out of the skills since the call entered the skill, the overflow will still be triggered. We recommend 30 seconds.

Voice: Queue Callback

• Utilize the Queue Callback Offer Window settings to limit customers from scheduling queue callbacks in the final portion of your working hours. As your team is focused on clearing the queue(s) at the end of the day, having a reduced number of callbacks still pending will be advantageous. Many customers set the offer window to close 30-60 mins before closing time so that no additional callbacks can be scheduled after that time. Please note that all callbacks that were scheduled within the window will still be returned until resolved.
• If your contact center only has a few agents, consider using the Reserve Agent callback strategy over the Wait in Queue strategy. When using the latter, you have an increased risk of introducing callers back into the queue when there is still a large amount of time to wait.
• Though possible, we do not recommend offering queue callback scheduling as well as the ability to opt out of the queue and leave a voicemail in the same queue. Checking voicemail is not efficient for agents, leaves room for error, and increases the time they are out of the queue.
• Consider only offering the queue callback message after a few minutes at a minimum. If your agents were going to have the call answered in the first few minutes anyways, a prematurely scheduled callback only delays the process further. You may review reports to identify the average abandoned time and make sure it’s offered before that time.
• If your clientele includes an increased number of callers who would be calling from a company number, disable the “Attempt to guess return number” setting. This forces them to enter their number manually. If a customer accidentally accepts the callback to their company number and not their direct number, they will not get the callback.
• If you do not want any unresolved queue callbacks to be returned to your customers again the next morning, be sure to define a value for Clear Pending Callbacks. We recommend midnight.
• When changing the Caller ID Return Number, which is a Queue Callback setting for attempting to read back the caller ID of the customer wanting to call back, in most cases the best practice is to select True. This will read back to the customer, text to speech, their Caller ID as it has been provided to the Contact Center for the service provider.

Web Chat

Set Up Agent’s Nickname

• Define nicknames for all chat agents. By default, the name your customers will see for agents is what we pull from the phone system directory. For example, “JDoe (827)”. If you would rather the agent name displayed to customers is “John,” you’ll need to set up his nickname. To do so, navigate to Realtime > Supervisor View and select the menu icon in an agent tile “...”. Then select Change Profile and enter the desired nickname. Save your changes.
• It is best practice to configure the MCW (missed chat wrapup) to log the agent out of all skills (instead of a timer) in the event they miss a chat. As the webpage offering chat is looking for available agents, it is a great way to eliminate after hour chat messages from being offered to agents who forgot to log out of the Contact Center Agent Client at the end of their day. This setting is modified under System Settings > Voice > Missed Chat Action, and selecting “Log the Agent out of skills.”