How to prioritize call routing

Some call centers want to give special treatment to certain calls, often referred to as “VIP” calls. These calls might come from a specific phone number, and the goal is to ensure they reach an agent faster than regular calls.

The only way to prioritize these calls is by adding delays for lower-priority calls. At the same time, it’s essential to have agents available to handle the VIP calls when they arrive.

Let’s use a couple of analogies to make this concept clearer:

Imagine you’re waiting in line to enter a nightclub. Suddenly, the doorman places a red rope in front of you because a celebrity, like Beyoncé, has arrived with her entourage. -- The only way the doorman can let them in first is by holding up the regular guests.

A more practical analogy would be a large package sorting center, like DHL or Amazon. Packages have different attributes, including priority levels. To ensure that high-priority packages are delivered faster, the system introduces delays for processing lower-priority packages.

In both scenarios, two factors are crucial:

1. The delays applied to lower-priority calls/packages/guests.

2. The availability of staff (agents or processing units) to handle the prioritized items.

Now let's look at the technical bit:

First, we'll deal with introducing delays to the lower priority calls.

The order in which calls are processed is almost independent of the selection of agents for calls. The only influence that the selection of agents has is that if none are available for a particular call, the call will stay queued (or else - depending on the call flow configuration). But that does not change the order in which the calls are processed.

Each call’s handling time is based on its own timeline: when it enters the queue, start of attempt to reach an agent, end of attempt to reach an agent, time of queue leave,, and so on. These timestamps are specific to each call and don’t depend on other calls. This means that at any time, and for every individual call, the system tries to connect a particular call to the agents based on the selections.

Below is an example of a call flow configuration designed to prioritize VIP calls by introducing delays for lower-priority calls:

The main mechanism is the delay built into the queuing of low priority calls. The call flow removes low priority calls from the queue while high priority calls remain in the queue. By adjusting the length of the audio played in the Prompt Player at the bottom, you can adjust the extent to which higher priority calls are favored.

The second part is to ensure that agents are set up to handle higher priority calls. Therefore, we have to adjust the selection mechanism for these calls:

Head to IVR / Voicebot > Queues and select the queue for which you want to define your prioritization.

In the screenshot you see two selections, one with "Group 1 internal" for high priority calls and one with "Group 2 external" for low priority calls. Note that the selections use groups, but you could also use tags for that.

To learn more about creating and managing queues, head over to this article.