This article explains how queues work, and how best to use them. You can also learn how to:
Queues form the backbone of RequestTrackerPro’s agent response system, and will help your agents keep on top of incoming tickets to keep response times fast. Queues are highly flexible, and can be set up to accommodate a wide variety of different business needs.
How Queues Work
In RequestTrackerPro, it’s helpful to think of a queue as a set of tickets coming in from a specific email address. When a customer sends a email request, that email will be converted to a ticket and assigned to a specific queue depending on which email address the request was sent to.
On the simpler side of things, your company might have a single support email contact of support@yourcompany.com, and in RequestTrackerPro, you would have a single queue that would let you see each ticket coming in to that email address. Other common examples are using sales@yourcompany.com to receive sales inquiries and placing leads in a “Sales” queue.
But most businesses are bigger and have more nuanced customer service needs, and even have different departments handling different kinds of requests. This is where queues can become incredibly helpful.
Your organization can have as many — or as few — queues as you need, and you can set them up very quickly. If you’re a large software organization and your tech support teams handle a wide variety of different tasks, like service outages, registration issues, and bug reports, then you could have a queue for each. When a customer sends a help request to outages@yourcompany.com, then it automatically will be routed into the correct queue.
When looking at the Queues dashboard, each incoming ticket is placed into its corresponding queue, making it super easy to understand where you — and your agents — should be focusing. Combined with the heatmaps feature, your agents will always know which tickets take priority, and which can wait.
Agent Responses Made Easy
When responding to a ticket or taking a customer call, your agents will see different information depending on the queue. This makes it easier to partially automate some of the tedious aspects of ticket responses, and make it easier for your agents to stay on message, ask the right questions at the right times, and prevent key information from being missed when helping customers.
When creating a new queue, information added to the Take Call Content section will automatically appear whenever an agent opens a ticket in the queue. For example, you could include a reminder to validate the customer’s login credentials, check what type of software they are using, and so on.
Queues can also be configured to appear only for specific users. For example, if one of your support agents is highly knowledgeable about SQL, you could set up a sql-support@yourcompany.com email address, assign it its own queue, and assign your SQL expert to that queue. That way, the SQL expert agent would be the only one to see tickets coming in for SQL-based support. Alternatively, you could route all design feedback to your design team, or bug reports to the engineer team, and so on.
The Catchall Queue
The Catchall Queue is where all incoming support tickets go that do not have a corresponding queue, and acts as the initial default of all incoming support messages.
For example, if your company has a queue for sales@yourcompany.com, all incoming tickets to support@yourcompany.com would appear in that queue. However, if a customer sent a ticket to support@yourcompany.com, and you have not created a queue for support@yourcompany.com, then those support tickets will appear in the Catchall Queue.
The Catchall Queue is designed to serve as a backup and a placeholder until your organization has created a queue for each relevant support email address for your organization, and it cannot be deleted or edited. When responding to a ticket in the catchall queue, your agents will be prompted to assign it to a more appropriate queue.