Show customers their average wait time in a queue

Omnichannel for Customer Service offers a suite of capabilities that extend the power of Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise to enable organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers across digital messaging channels. An additional license is required to access Omnichannel for Customer Service. For more information, see the Dynamics 365 Customer Service pricing overview and Dynamics 365 Customer Service pricing plan pages.

Overview

As an administrator, you can enable the feature that displays a customer's average wait time in the queue to start a chat with an agent. It helps set customer expectations when wait times are long because of a high volume of customers needing support, understaffing, or long call-handling times. When you display the average wait time to the customer, the customer can decide whether to wait in the queue or return to the chat later.

With this feature turned on, when customers are placed in the queue, they receive the notification: Average wait time <n> mins.

The average wait time is calculated based on wait times from the previous 48 hours and a minimum of 50 conversations for the specific queue. This is an estimated time, and doesn't change for the customer. The average wait time is displayed only if the wait is one minute or longer. When there's no wait, the average wait time isn't displayed.

Note

If skill-based routing is configured with exact skill match, the queue position that's displayed to a customer on the chat portal widget might not be accurate; therefore, the assignment of an agent to the customer might take longer than expected.

Enable average wait time

If you're using the Customer Service admin center or Omnichannel admin center (deprecated) app, follow these steps:

Important

Omnichannel admin center is deprecated. Use the Customer Service admin center app for admin tasks across Customer Service.

1. Go to the workstream of the chat widget in which you need to configure the settings, select edit for the required chat widget, and on the Chat channel Settings page, go to the Behaviors tab.

2. Select Customer wait time if you want to show to customers their position in the queue and the average wait time when they're waiting to interact with an agent.

3. Select Save and Close.

See also

Show customers their position in a queue
Overview of skill-based routing
Add a chat widget
Configure a pre-chat survey
Configure agent display name
Create quick replies
Create and manage operating hours
Create chat authentication settings
Embed chat widget in Power Apps portals