Ability to Reserve Idle Agents for Inbound Queues

In many contact centers, queued inbound calls are more important than queued outbound calls. In situations where there is an ample supply of queued outbound calls waiting, all agents will be kept busy all of the time. When a new inbound call comes in, chances are, the caller has to wait for an agent to finish their less important outbound call. The Reserve Idle Agents feature allows a configurable number of agents to be reserved, in “Available and idle” state, to improve the probability of quickly attending to a new inbound call. While there are fewer than the assigned number of reserved “Available and idle” agents, no queued outbound calls will be presented to agents. Whenever the “Available and idle” agents reserve is exceeded then the most idle agent will receive a queued outbound call.

To improve handling of inbound queues when queued outbound calls are less important, you must first define an outbound phone script and assign it to an outbound phone queue. In the outbound phone script, specify the inbound queue you wish to prioritize and the number of reserved agents at a time to be prevented from handling queued outbound calls.

Note: This feature only applies to outbound calls that are assigned to go through an outbound queue. Aclick-to-dial call is a direct outbound call that does not go through a real outbound queue.

To reserve an inbound queue's idle agent:

From the Configuration menu, open Scripts. Scripts are grouped by media in separate tabs: Phone, Chat, Email and Social.
Go to the Phone tab and click to Add new phone script.
In Script type drop-down menu, select Outbound phone.
Enter a Script name for the script.
In Assigned Queues, link the outbound phone script to an outbound phone queue, and click Save.
Go to the Script tab.
In Test Queue, select the phone queue you like to protect and test the availability of its agents.
Specify the Number of agents to reserve, and save.

Whenever an outbound interaction such as a customer callback needs to be made, it will be offered to the longest idle agent only if there are enough reserved idle agents for that queue. For example, if you designate four agents as reserved in an inbound queue, the outbound interaction will be offered to the longest idle agent whenever the fifth agent becomes available in the queue.

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