[asterisk-users] To queue or not to queue...

[Gregory Malsack]

> Hello All,
>
> History ~
> I recently took a position with a call center. At the time they had 
> about 50 agents in a call queue. The queue was setup to ringall. The 
> agents use Eyebeam softphones. Everything is local lan, no routers, 
> everything connected via Cisco 3600 10/100 switches.
>
> Now we are up to about 150 agents, and I have kept everything pretty 
> much the same way for a couple of reasons. However, those reasons are 
> slowly drifting away and it's become the right time for me to start 
> questioning some of the previous configuration.
>
> Here's the scenario~
> 150 agents, all are commission based sales reps. 99% of the calls are 
> answered within the first ring. the rest are answered between the 
> second and third ring. Never in my 4 months with the company has a 
> queue call been in the queue more then 20 seconds.
>
> Problem~
> Several times a week or sometimes a day, the reps will tell me that 
> the same call will be answered by 3 or 4 or 5 reps, and none of them 
> get the inbound audio. Asterisk only shows 1 of the reps actually 
> connecting the call, however the call logs in Eyebeam for all 5 reps, 
> show that they took the call and were connected for a short period of 
> time before disconnecting the call because there is no inbound audio.
>
> Point of discussion~
> Is there really a reason to maintain a queue? With the companies 
> growth they are now discussing the option of sending certain 
> affiliates to certain sales reps. Am I better off using ring groups? 
> Additionally I am working towards running as much of my configs via 
> mysql as possible and turning up multiple servers to handle the calls. 
> So far we have reached 130 simultaneous calls on one server, and about 
> 10,000 calls processed during a 12 hour day.
>
> Thanks for reading. I look forward to hearing peoples views on this...