Create a WFM Queue

A queue represents a Contact Center, inbox, queue or channel that your team staffs and serves.

By organising your calls, emails or messages into queues, you can accurately forecast the expected contact volume and required staffing for each queue. This allows you to optimize staffing levels and ensures your team is equipped to handle the expected workload.

Queues can be organised based on various criteria, including:

• Channel: Group contacts by communication channel (e.g., phone, email, chat).

• Team Structure: Categorize contacts based on your team's structure (e.g., sales, support, or language-specific teams).

• Customer Segment: Segment contacts based on customer type or priority level.

Let’s dive into the details.

Who can use this

WFM Admins can create queues.

Dialpad WFM is available to all Dialpad users and as a standalone product.

Contact your Customer Success Manager to discuss adding Dialpad WFM to your plan.

Create a queue

Creating a queue is a simple process. First, you’ll need to map the correct contacts into the group and then define how the contacts are handled and your desired service targets.

Before you start you’ll need to connect your CRM or customer service platform(s).

Dialpad users

If you have a Dialpad Contact Center, Dialpad WFM will automatically create a queue for each of your Voice Contact Centers.

To create a WFM queue:

1. Navigate to Forecasts

2. Select Queues

3. Select + New queue
   
   

4. Name your queue

   1. It’s helpful to match the queue name to relevant inbox, Contact Center, or channel in the relevant customer service platform.

5. Select the data source

   1. Customer Service Integration: select from one of your integrated systems, e.g. Dialpad or Zendesk.

   2. CSV: import historical data via CSV - helpful if you use a system that’s currently unsupported by Dialpad WFM.

Using a CSV?

Refer to this article for a step by step guide for forecasting with CSVs

Define queue:

Next, you need to identify which contacts belong to this group using filters and conditions, e.g. “direction is inbound”, “team_id is Tier 1”.

1. Select the integration.

2. Select + Add filter

3. In the box that appears, select the following:

   1. The property you want to filter by — these are the metadata types attached to your contacts (e.g. tags, views or direction).

   2. A condition (e.g. is, is any, contains).

   3. The value(s) you want the contacts to match. The system will pull the list of available values direct from your data. If there are no existing values then you can enter a value as free text.

   

As you apply filters and conditions, the preview chart will display the number of contacts that match your criteria from the past 7 days. This allows you to cross-reference with your customer service platform and verify that the right contacts are included in the group.

Note

Values you create today won't be available until the following day, once the latest data is gathered from your customer service platform.

Coverage requirement

Now you need to provide additional additional inputs to turn the forecasted contact volume into a coverage requirement.

1. Enter the Average Conversation Time (ACT). Learn more about ACT here.

   1. This is the average time if takes an agent to handle and resolve the conversation, sometimes referred to as Average Handle Time (AHT). You can find your AHT in Dialpad by visiting Analytics, filtering to the relevant Contact Center and selecting Duration.

   2. Once your schedule is live, and monitoring agent behaviour, Dialpad WFM will provide ACT data for each queue in Performance Reports.

2. Add concurrency (optional)

   1. This represents how many contacts agents can work on at a time.

   2. For most channels this will be 1, but for chat it may be higher.

3. Enter shrinkage

   1. This should include external shrinkage (e.g. time off, sickness) and internal shrinkage (e.g. meetings, comfort breaks) and be represented as a %. Learn more about shrinkage

4. Enter your target First Response Time (FRT), sometimes referred to as an SLA (Service Level Agreement).

   1. This specifies the percentage of contacts you aim to respond to within a target first response time, such as 90% of calls answered in 60 seconds.

   2. Enter the percentage and target time in seconds to ensure you have accurate staffing requirements based on your forecast.

Set operating times

Define your queue’s operating hours so staffing is matched to when customers will be reaching out for help and support.

1. Define if this queue is open 24/7 or is only open during specific times. If your queue is open 24/7 then you can skip to the next section.
   

2. Select the timezone that operating hours are set it.

3. Select the pencil icon next to each day to edit your business hours
   

4. Toggle on/off to set a day as open or closed

5. Enter the desired hours
   

   1. Select Copy time to all to apply the same operating hours to all days of the week.

   2. Select + Add hours to create multiple windows in a day. This is helpful if your queue is closed for lunch.

Note

Contact volumes are always forecasted 24/7, but coverage requirements will only be provided within operating times in the schedule coverage bar.

Performance (optional)

Finally, you can opt-in to provide additional data to improve the accuracy of agent metrics for messaging channels. This allows the system to more accurately measure the time agents spend on each interaction when measuring adherence. Learn more here.

1. To enable this, check the box labelled “Add time spent per interaction”

2. Enter the applicable Average Interaction Time (AIT)

Save your queue

Once your queue is set-up, select Save.

The system will take a few minutes to process your new queue and generate the updated forecast. You can track the progress using the status indicator on the queue page. When your queue is ready, you’ll see a green checkmark in the Status column.

How to use queues

Dialpad WFM generates forecasts for each queue, showing the expected number of contacts and the staffing required to meet your service targets. This helps you plan the right number of agents for each queue based on forecasted demand.

In the forecast

You can view your forecast on the Forecast page. By default, your forecast will show the combined ticket volume.

To view the forecast per queue, select the ‘breakdown by queue’ box.

You can filter the queues shown using the dropdown.

In the schedule

Your queues and forecasts are used to power your schedule!

Monitor coverage

Link queues to activities to ensure you’re scheduling enough coverage to meet your SLAs. You can link more than 1 queue to an activity to account for agent’s working on multiple queues concurrently. Learn more

You’ll then be able to monitor coverage using the coverage bars. Learn more about Dialpad WFMs coverage bars.

Auto-schedule shifts

Dialpad WFM will schedule a day or week of shifts for each agent to optimize coverage while ensuring that each agent’s contractual requirements are met. Learn more

Auto-schedule coverage

Using an Activity Plan, you can schedules activities according to forecasted demand of the linked queues. This ensures you have the right level of coverage to serve your customers and meet your SLAs. Learn more

In Performance reports

When queues are linked to activities, you can track your agent's productivity and adherence on each queue. Learn more

In the Insights page

Dialpad WFM analyses your schedules, comparing your scheduled time to the forecasted requirement, giving you insight into your shrinkage, productive time and arrival patterns.

Frequently asked questions

Can I set different working hours for specific days, like one schedule for the first Monday of the month and another for the third Monday?

No, working hours repeat weekly for each day. However, admins can make manual adjustments at any time for one-time changes.

Is there a limit to how many time windows I can set in a day or week?

Nope! You can add as many time windows as you need in a day however, they can’t overlap. For example, you can’t have one queue open from 9 AM - 11 AM and another open from 10 AM - 1 PM.

Are my operating hours synced with my Dialpad account?

No, operating hours are not synced with your Dialpad Contact Center settings. You need to copy them across.

Having problems?

Be sure to read our Queue Troubleshooting article for more information.