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

Dialpad WFM is available to all Dialpad users.

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

Create a queue

Creating and editing queues is a simple 2-step 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 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 an integration

   1. Your CRM must already be connected in order to see it listed.

6. Select the channel type

   1. Real-Time: Live channels such as phone or chat.

   2. Non Real-time: Asynchronous interactions, such as email.  

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 + Add filter

2. 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)

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.

Performance (optional)

Finally, you can opt-in to provide additional inputs 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. 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 everything has been added, 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 desired queues from the toolbar.

In the schedule

You can also link queues to activities, allowing you to track your scheduled coverage compared to the forecasted requirement.  

To track time-on-task

When queues are linked to activities, you can track your agent's productivity and behavior.

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.

Having problems?

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