Queues
Where inbound work waits, who it is offered to, in what order, and how long an offer stands.
A queue is where inbound work waits until an agent takes it: a support line, a callback line, a chat lane. Queues live at Contact centre, Queues, and until one exists nothing can be routed at all.
Creating and editing queues needs admin or owner. Everyone else sees no management controls here at all rather than controls that fail, and can still read live depth and waits on the Wallboard and take work under My work.
Only the phone channel fills these lanes
The channel filter offers six channels, and exactly one of them enqueues here today: phone. Live chat has its own queue end to end and is answered from the inbox thread header, so a chat queue created here would sit empty with nothing on this screen or the wallboard to say why.
The fields
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | Required, up to 120 characters. It appears on the wallboard and on every offer, so name it after the work rather than after the team. |
| Description | Optional, up to 500 characters. |
| Channel filter | Which channels this queue accepts: phone, callback, chat, SMS, WhatsApp or video. Selecting none means any channel. |
| Distribution | Longest idle, the default, or round robin. |
| Offer TTL | How long an unanswered offer stands before it goes back to the queue. Between 5 and 600 seconds, default 30. |
| Max waiting | A ceiling on how many tasks may wait at once. Blank means unbounded. |
Longest idle offers work to whoever has gone longest without any, which accounts for how long the last piece of work took. Round robin distributes turns rather than effort.
Offer TTL is the setting people get wrong most often. Too short and offers bounce past somebody who was reaching for the mouse; too long and a customer waits out an agent who has stepped away. Thirty seconds is a reasonable start for phone and worth raising for anything slower.
Set Max waiting when you would rather turn work away at the door than let it join a queue nobody can clear.
Status timeouts
Beside the queue list sits Status timeouts, which is a workspace rule rather than a per-queue one, which is why it is not a field in the queue editor. It moves an operator out of a status when they stop working in it, after a number of idle minutes you set. Idle means no mouse or keyboard activity in the studio; a tab left open on a second monitor is not activity. Both rules are off until you turn them on.
What a change affects
Edits apply to how new work routes. Work already offered or assigned is untouched, so nobody's live call is re-routed because you changed a strategy.
Deleting a queue cannot be undone.
If the list fails to load, the product says so and is explicit that nothing has changed and nothing has been deleted. A queue list that could not be read is never presented as an empty one.
Starting out
One queue, no channel filter, longest idle, a 30-second TTL and no ceiling routes work correctly on day one. Split it when you have a real reason: a different team, a different service level, a different set of hours.