Queue Setup
- Gnatta
- David Oliver (Deactivated)
- Abbey Brown
Every time you connect a channel in your domain, Gnatta will auto-generate a queue. When you’ve decided on your routing plan, you’ll need to take a look at your queues and decide whether to use, edit or delete them as appropriate.
Before you dive in, here are a few useful definitions for Gnatta-isms you’ll cross in this article:
Queues – Think of a queue as a pot of work - this is where Gnatta will store interactions ready to be assigned to your agents.
Priority – This is how you rate the importance of your pots of work. Interactions in higher priority queues will be assigned to agents before those in lower priority queues. That means you can map multiple queues to the same team of users, but still be sure important queues are prioritised. For example, you’ll likely want live channels like telephony or webchat to have the highest priority, so customers aren’t left waiting!
Escalation – To avoid low priority queues becoming stagnant when higher priority queues are overwhelmed for a prolonged period of time, you can add in escalation logic. This means you can make interactions more important the longer they’ve been waiting - so the interaction can take precedence over higher-rated queues, if necessary.
Score - By default, progress against the Escalation level is tracked by ‘Minutes customer waiting'. This is the total length of time a customer has been waiting across queues (if they have sent multiple messages on multiple channels, or the interaction has been assigned and then unassigned manually by the agent). In the Advanced configuration menu, you can change the Score to track 'Minutes on this queue' instead.
How does it fit together? Gnatta will assign work to your teams by first checking the escalation level of an interaction. Then it’ll check the priority of the queue the interaction is in. Together these checks will tell Gnatta how important the interaction is, so it can be assigned with the appropriate urgency (relative to other interactions currently queueing) to a member of the team the queue is mapped to.
Getting started
To access queues, you’ll need to go to Configuration > Queues. All of your queues will be listed here.
Some queues can be managed right here, in the Settings interface - such as any you’ve manually created yourself.
However, auto-generated queues (the ones Gnatta creates when you connected your channels) are a little more complex, and to make changes to them you’ll need to find them in Configuration > Advanced > Queues as follows:
Adding a queue
Gnatta auto-generates a queue with the same name as the account when you connect a new channel account - for example, it’ll create a ‘Testing’ queue for your ‘Testing’ email account. You can use, rename or delete these queues as required.
When you have a list of the queues you think you’re going to need based on your routing plan, it’s time to create them all! Navigate to Configuration > Queues and select ‘Add Queue’.
To create a Queue, give it a Name and select an Escalation.
No Escalations available? They may not have been configured yet. See the Escalations section later in this article to set it up.
Gnatta will automatically assign your new queue the lowest available priority - below all other queues already created. If your lowest current queue is on priority 9, for example, your new queue will be assigned as priority 10.
Click Save and you will see your Queue has been added to the list.
Select your Queue from the list to view escalation details and assign teams you want to receive work from that queue. To edit or delete the queue, click the three-dot menu next to the name.
Managing Priority
Clicking on the Priority tab on the page will open the priority editor. This will show all of your active queues and their current priority rating.
Drag and drop your Queues into priority order. Queues can be placed at the same priority if you want queues to share the same importance.
Once you have repositioned your queues, remember to click Save to keep your changes.
Managing Escalations
Escalations in Gnatta are used to increase the importance of Interactions over time - the older an interaction is, the more important it’ll become and the quicker it’ll be assigned to an agent.
You can adjust your available Escalations on the tab next to Priority, as shown below. Once you’ve created Escalations here, you can assign them to your queues. You can create as many or as few as you like - you could use variations to help manage interactions on specific queues differently. For example, you may want interactions on a VIP customers queue to escalate quicker than those on a generic queue, to minimise their waiting times.
You can bulk assign queues to a particular Escalation by clicking ‘Set queues’.
Escalations are broken down by service levels - Low, Medium and High. The Default Escalation in our example here starts with the service level of Low. That means when interactions join the queue(s) that this Escalation is mapped to, their service level will begin as Low.
In our example, this Escalation will mean interactions move up to Medium after just 10 minutes, and High after 20 minutes (total - the Score won’t reset after moving up a service level!). This is too fast for most use cases, so we’re going to fix that. To edit an Escalation, open the three-dot menu and select Edit escalation.
To add a new Escalation, select ‘Add Escalation’ in the top right of your screen. Give your new Escalation a name and select a default service level, then add your increments. Once you’ve reached the highest available service level (High), you’ll not be able to add any further increments.
Â
Simply click Save when your new Escalation is ready, and then assign it to the relevant queues.
What’s next?
Before you move on, you’ll need to be sure that you’ve:
Created all of the queues you think you need
Assigned them all to the relevant priority rating
Mapped them all to the relevant Escalation settings
If you’ve done all of these things, it’s time to create some custom data fields to display on your interactions.