Creating an omnichannel queue

This article is part of the Implementing Omni series. The previous article is Understanding Omni - Internal and external email addresses.

In your Admin account:

1. Go to the Inbound page.
2. Go to the Queues subpage.
3. Click the Create omnichannel queue button.

In the General Settings section:

4. Type a Name for your queue.
5. Type a Priority. This is a value from 1 to 100, with 100 being the highest priority. If calls or messages are waiting from two different queues, the next to be offered to an agent will come from whichever queue has the highest Priority value. This can result in an email being prioritised above a call.
6. Click the drop-down list to Select which time is used to determine queue position.

To understand this last option, imagine a queue with multiple messages waiting in it. The agent is offered one of the messages but rejects it. The rejected message re-enters the queue, becoming the most recent message to be queued.

• If you have selected When message Queued, the rejected message will go to the back of the queue as its requeue time is now the latest.
• If you have selected When message Arrived, the rejected message will go to the front of the queue again as its original arrival time is still the earliest.

 The remaining settings are not mandatory but do give more control over the way your queue works.

In the Redirections section you can specify what happens if you cannot handle a message. Redirections will send the message to be handled by a flow, so you would need to have flows to use these features.

7. If you want to use a timeout for your Omni queue, click to tick Activate timeout.
8. If you have activated timeouts, you can then specify how long a message waits before the timeout applies. Type a number for hours, minutes or seconds. The shortest valid timeout is 10 seconds, the longest is 1000 hours.
9. Click the If timeout is reached redirect to drop-down list to select which flow handles the message if it times out.  
10. If there are no agents currently set to active for inbound, you can have another flow handle the message. Click the drop-down list at the bottom of this section to choose a flow, otherwise the default option leaves the contact in the queue.

In the Queue’s skills section:

11. Click to tick the checkboxes for the skill or skills the agents will need to serve this queue.

When all the appropriate options have been selected:

12. Click the Create button.

Now that you have a queue, you will need an inbound route to connect to it.