System information

callers to. This can be done wherever you would normally place your dialplan logic to
perform transfers. We’re going to use the LocalSets context, which we’ve previously
enabled as the starting context for our devices:
[LocalSets]
include => Queue ; allow direct transfer of calls to queues
[Queues]
exten => 7000,1,Verbose(2,Entering the support queue)
same => n,Queue(support) ; standard support queue available
; at extension 7000
same => n,VoiceMail(7000@queues,u) ; if there are no members in the queue,
; we exit and send the caller to voicemail
same => n,Hangup()
exten => 8000,1,Verbose(2,Entering the priority support queue)
same => n,Queue(support-priority) ; priority queue available at
; extension 8000
same => n,VoiceMail(7000@queues,u) ; if there are no members in the queue,
; we exit and send the caller to voicemail
same => n,Hangup()
There you have it: two queues defined with different weights. We’ve configured our
standard queues to start at extension 7000, and our priority queues to start at 8000. We
can mirror this for several queues by simply matching between the 7XXX and 8XXX ranges.
So, for example, if we have our sales queue at extension 7004, our priority-sales queue
(for returning customers, perhaps?) could be placed in the mirrored queue at 8004,
which has a higher weight.
The only other configuration left to do is to make sure some or all of your queue mem-
bers are placed in both queues. If you have more callers in your 7XXXX queues, you may
want to have more queue members logged into that queue, with a percentage of your
queue members logged into both queues. Exactly how you wish to configure your
queues will depend on your local policy and circumstances.
Queue Member Priority
Within a queue, we can penalize members in order to lower their preference for being
called when there are people waiting in a particular queue. For example, we may pe-
nalize queue members when we want them to be a member of a queue, but to be used
only when the queue gets full enough that all our preferred agents are unavailable. This
means we can have three queues (say, support, sales, and billing), each containing
the same three queue members: James Shaw, Kay Madsen, and Danielle Roberts.
Suppose, however, that we want James Shaw to be the preferred contact in the
support queue, Kay Madsen preferred in sales, and Danielle Roberts preferred in
billing. By penalizing Kay Madsen and Danielle Roberts in support, we ensure that
James Shaw will be the preferred queue member called. Similarly, we can penalize James
284 | Chapter 13: Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) Queues