Define voice queues
Work items represent items related to a customer that an agent is working on. A work item might be a text or chat conversation that a representative is having with a customer. It could be a new case submitted through a self-service portal, or it could be a voice call that needs to be routed and assigned to a representative. In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, work items are first assigned to a queue and then distributed to representatives with the help of unified routing.
Unified routing is an intelligent, enterprise-grade routing and assignment capability that can route incoming work items to the best-suited representative based on configurable factors. For example, an incoming call to a number that is in Germany would likely indicate that the customer speaks German. Unified routing helps ensure that the call is routed to the representative who speaks German and can currently accept the call.
Unified routing applies a two-step process to route and distribute work:
Route to queue - The incoming work item is classified and then assigned to the appropriate queue, such as routing it to a German queue or to a queue that is associated with a specific product line.
Distributed to an agent - The work item is assigned to a representative in real time. Unified routing looks at the representative's current presence (available, busy, and so on) and available capacity to determine whom to assign the call to.
Before you can route incoming voice calls to representatives, make sure that you have the necessary voice queues set up in your environment to ensure that incoming calls can be routed appropriately. For example, if you want to route conversations to different queues based on language (English, German, Spanish, and so on), then you should have the necessary queues in place to support this plan. After you've created a queue, define which representatives are available to be assigned items from the queue, such as adding your German-speaking users to the German queue. Later in this module, we discuss how to configure rules to define how items are routed to the queue.
Create a queue for the voice channel
Before you create a queue, make sure that you consider how calls are routed and assigned to representatives. For example, if you plan to route and assign calls based on language, ensure that you have queues available based on the languages that you plan to support. If you plan to route calls based on other factors, such as type of call or product offerings, then ensure that your available queues support those options.
You can create queues in the Customer Service admin center by navigating to Queues under the Customer support group and selecting Manage under the Advanced queues group. When creating a new queue, specify the following information:
Name - Defines what you want to call the queue, such as English Queue or German Queue.
Type - Defines the type of work items that can be routed to this queue. *For voice conversations, select Voice.
Group number - Use the group number to help you better organize your queues. It doesn't affect priority or routing. For example, you might set all language queues to a specific group number.
After you've created your queue, specify which users should be added to the queue. Incoming voice calls that are routed to the queue are only assigned to representatives who have been added as members of the queue. Make sure that you add at least one user. You can only add users who have been set up for unified routing.
One unique challenge regarding voice calls is that, occasionally, the queue can receive too many incoming calls at once. For example, you might find that more customers call during the evening hours or that a specific event has occurred that resulted in a temporary increase in incoming calls. When these situations occur, customers can experience longer-than-average wait times. To help in these instances, organizations can determine when and how to handle these scenarios by setting up call overflow assignment rules. Optionally, you can define the days and hours the queue is active. Representatives only receive work during these hours.
For more information, see Overflow assignment.
Now that you've learned how to create and define queues for routing voice calls, you can learn how to use workstreams to manage incoming voice conversations and how to route to the appropriate voice queue.