User Guide

Getting Work 25
This chapter provides an overview of working in the Agent Console, and outlines the various settings and
options that can be configured to improve your productivity.
Getting Work
As an agent, there are different way in which work may be assigned to you. This section outlines the various
ways in which work, in the form of activities, is routed to you. Depending on the types of activities you handle,
like email, chat, callback, blended collaboration, etc., you may experience one or more of the routing methods
outlined here.
Overview of Routing
Routing Emails and Chats
Emails are retrieved from the mail server and placed into the database. Workflows act on them, creating an
activity for each email, and applying the business rules configured by a system administrator. Workflows can
then route the email activity either directly to an agent, or to a queue.
Chats are initiated from entry points and are routed directly to the queue associated with that entry point.
From queues, activities are routed to agents using one of the following methods:
 Push routing: System routes activities to agents. Activities can be load balanced between agents, or routed in
a round robin fashion.
 Load balanced: Activities are routed to agents who have the least number of activities in their inbox.
Chat activities are load balanced among available agents.
 Round robin: Activities are routed to agents in a continuous sequence, irrespective of the number of
activities in their inbox. This option is not available for chat activities.
 Pull routing: Agents pull activities from queues based on permissions. Activities are not pushed to agents. If
your system is configured to use pull routing, make sure you set up the pull options before you begin
working on activities. See “Setting Pull Options” on page 25.
Tasks
Typically, tasks are created by supervisors of agents and routed manually to other agents. The system can also be
configured to automatically create tasks using workflows.
Setting Pull Options
Standalone agents can pull activities from queues and can set options that affect activity pulling. You can specify
the queues from which you want to pull activities, which activities to pull and how many activities to pull at a
time. Pull options are set from the Options window which is launched using the Option button in the Agent
Console toolbar. Note that standalone agents cannot pull activities from mapped queues or mapped agents.