Create and manage call queuesUpdated 7 days ago

Call queues are a routing system that control which agents or teams receive incoming calls from Gorgias Voice. You can use call queues to prioritize and distribute calls to your team, manage call volume, and customize the caller's experience while they wait to connect with an agent.

If you have more than one phone line (Voice integration), you can create multiple, unique call queues to route and answer calls. You can also route multiple phone lines into the same queue to manage calls and provide a single caller experience.

For each call queue, you can configure the following settings:

• Assign agents or teams to receive incoming calls, and decide how they receive calls (round-robin or broadcast)
• Set a queue capacity to limit how many callers can wait in queue
• Set a queue as priority to handle urgent or VIP calls first
• Customize the caller experience with wait time and music
• Disable a queue to pause routing when your agents are not available

Requirements

• You must have the Voice add-on as part of your Gorgias subscription
• You must have Admin permission to create and edit Call Queues

Create a new queue

You can create one or more queues from the Voice settings in Gorgias. You can also create a queue whenever you set up a new Voice integration with a phone number.

1. Go to Settings > Voice from the main menu
2. Select the Queues tab, then click on Create Queue
3. Enter a Queue name (for example, “🌓 After Hours” or “Billing & Payments”)
4. Enter a Queue capacity
   
   
   • Your queue capacity is a limit on the number of callers that can wait in a queue at the same time
   • After the capacity limit has been reached, any new callers in the queue are sent directly to voicemail

Set a queue as priority

You can set up any queue as a priority queue. Callers who enter a priority queue are routed to available agents first before callers in a non-priority queue. Learn more about call prioritization.

You might use a priority queue to make sure customers with urgent inquiries or VIPs are served before other callers.

1. Go to Settings > Voice from the main menu
2. Select the Queues tab
3. Select an existing queue or create a new one
4. Use the toggle to enable Priority Queue

Assign agents to a queue (routing options)

You can use routing options to customize how incoming calls flow to the agents or teams assigned to a queue.

If you need to create or manage your teams, go to team settings.

1. Go to Settings > Voice from the main menu
2. Select the Queues tab
3. Select an existing queue or create a new one
4. Under Routing options, choose how calls are distributed to agents
   
   
   • Ring to: open the dropdown menu to select the teams assigned to receive calls from this queue
   • Ringing behavior: select how teams are rung when they receive a call from the queue (round-robin or broadcast)
   • Ring time per agent: enter the number of seconds a call should ring each agent (minimum 10s, max 600s)
     
     
     • For round-robin calls → the agent with the most time since their last call receives the call first. The call rings according to your set ring time before moving on to the next available agent.
     • For broadcast calls → all available agents receive the call at the same time. The call rings according to your set ring time.

Review the following table for more details on ringing behavior:

Customize the caller waiting experience

For each call queue, you can change the maximum wait time and the music that callers hear while they wait to connect with an agent.

1. Go to Settings > Voice from the main menu
2. Select the Queues tab
3. Select an existing queue or create a new one
4. Under Caller experience, customize the following settings:
   
   
   • Wait time: enter the maximum number of seconds a caller can wait in the queue before being sent to voicemail (minimum 10s, max 3600s)
   • Wait music: choose the music that callers hear while waiting for an agent in the queue. Select Choose from library to use an available music clip or Custom recording to upload your own mp3 file (max 3MB)

Enable or disable a call queue

You can disable a call queue at any time to prevent it from receiving incoming calls. This is useful during holidays and special events, or whenever your team is finished actively taking calls.

When a call queue is disabled, any new incoming calls are sent directly to voicemail. Any existing calls will stay in the queue until the maximum wait time expires before being sent to voicemail.

1. Go to Settings > Voice
2. Select the Queues tab
   
   
   • Here you can see, at glance, which queues are currently Enabled or Disabled
3. Select an existing queue
4. Use the ON/OFF toggle in the top, right-hand corner to enable or disable the queue

Delete a call queue

You can delete a call queue whenever it is no longer needed. If a queue is currently assigned to a Voice integration, you must first assign a new queue to the integration before you can delete the existing one.

Deleting a queue cannot be undone. Any settings associated with the queue are lost.

1. Go to Settings > Voice
2. Select the Queues tab
3. Select the queue you want to delete
4. Select Delete Queue, then Delete again to confirm

How calls are served to agents from a queue

Because you can have multiple call queues that might receive and distribute calls to the same agent or teams, we use the following logic to serve calls to agents:

• All inbound calls that enter a queue are served to available agents on a first-in, first-out basis regardless of which phone line (Voice integration) the call comes from
• A call is considered “served” once it has been distributed to an agent. We do not wait for an agent to answer a call before serving the next caller in the queue
• When an available agent is assigned to more than one queue with calls waiting, we serve the call that arrived first across the two queues
• Calls from a priority queue are always served first before calls from a non-priority queue, regardless of which call arrived first

Default settings for call queues

Whenever you create a new call queue, we automatically apply default settings to help you get started faster.

You can always change your settings for a queue, like routing options or the caller experience, after it has been created. Below are the default settings that we automatically apply to any new call queue, unless you change them:

• Queue capacity: 100
• Priority: Toggled off
• Distribution behavior: ‘All available agents’ (Round-robin)
• Ring time per agent: 30s
• Wait time: 120s
• Wait music: Chill While Waiting