How queues work

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A queue is a set of waiting tickets with an order and a group of agents who can take them. Everything else is detail.

What a queue holds

  • Conditions: which tickets belong in it.
  • An order: which goes first.
  • Groups: who can receive from it.
  • Optionally subqueues, which refine the order further.

The default queue

Without custom queues, routing uses a default that assigns within the ticket's group by priority and age. For many teams that is enough, and building queues you do not need is a way to make a simple system complicated.

Order within a queue

Tickets are ordered by the criteria you set, usually priority then age. This is where a queue earns its place: it encodes what should be answered first, once, instead of relying on every agent making the same judgement.

An agent can be in several

Queues are evaluated in order, so an agent in three queues receives from the first that has work for them. That makes queue ordering a way to express priority between kinds of work, not just within one kind.

What a queue is not

  • Not a view. A view is a list to look at. A queue is what routing hands out from.
  • Not a group. Groups say who agents are. Queues say what waits.
  • Not a permission. Agents can still open tickets that a queue would not hand them.

See also

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