Unified Routing – Queue Priority

I’m using Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Contact Center to route cases and I have multiple queues …. but what if I want one queue to have priority over another?

This requirement has been expressed in several of my projects! And until recently I would have explained that routing based on queue priority was not possible. As we could prioritize work items within a queue, but we had no ability for one queue to have priority over another.

But we can now route based on queue priority. As explained in the link shown below;

Assign work from higher-priority queues to agents first | Microsoft Learn

Below you can see that Microsoft have recently made a change to allow us to assign work based on queue priority.

This is great as several times I’ve wanted to prioritize the conversations or records in one queue over another. What-if (for example) you had a queue for your VIP customers and you’d like their conversations to be routed to agents first??

Notice that the statement above mentions “group number”. You may (or may not) be aware that each advanced queue has a group number field. Previously this field was simply used to sequence (aka group) queues in list views. The group number had no impact on routing priority.

In fact, the “tool tip” on the group number field still has a comment to that effect! (See below.) But we can now ignore that comment!!

As now the group number does have an impact on routing.

Tip / FYI: Group number is always has had the schema name “priority”!

I wanted to test this new feature out. Creating a test wasn’t as easy as I needed to queue up multiple workitems. I will explain how I tested this and my results below.

In my example I decided to create a test using record routing. But I assume we could achieve the same results with any channel.

My Queues

I first created two queues. I’d use one for “most” cases and a second for high priority cases.

As you can see below, I gave my high priority case queue a low group number (10). And my regular queue a high group number (1000). Meaning the lower the group number the higher the priority the queue has.

My Workstream

This was just a test, but I wanted to route most cases to the queue I’d called “Record Queue (Cases)”. But a limited number of high priority cases needed to route to my high priority queue.

In my simple example I decided to send all cases for a particular customer to my high priority queue. You could (of course) use other logic, maybe all complaints should be sent to a high priority queue. Or maybe all you VIP customers should have their cases resolved first.

Meaning I created the simple routing rule shown below.

Tip: For my test I used a capacity profile that limited each agent to just one case. That was I could easily see the order the cases were assigned to my user.

My Test

First, I set my agent to “do not disturb”! As I wanted to stop them getting any new cases.

Next, I created two cases. My first was a normal priority case. My second was for my high priority customer. Meaning the first case would be routed to my normal queue. My second case would be routed to my high priority queue.

You can see below that in my routing diagnostics I could see both cases. So I know they were both queues and waiting to be assigned.

Normally cases across queues would be routed based on the order they are created. (First in first out, regardless of queue.)

Meaning if I made my agent available, I would expect the first case to be assigned to the agent to be the one that was queued first. But instead, as you can see below the case first assigned to my agent was the one I titled “Created 2nd”.

Excited by these results I decided to complete a second test.

This time, I would queue two regular cases. And then a third case would be my high priority case. What would be the result???

As I now expected … the case created 3^rd (aka last) was assigned to my agent first. Then the case that was created 1^st was assign, followed by the one created 2^nd. Meaning first the priority (group number) of the queue was being considered, followed by the age of the cases.

I am really pleased to see this feature working, as it has been requested several times by my customers. Thanks Microsoft.

Original Post https://neilparkhurst.com/2024/09/23/unified-routing-queue-priority/