Understanding Contact Points, Queues and Roles

Overview

While listed as separate items, Contact Points, Queues, and Roles are all interconnected to allow conversation routing in the Quiq application.

Contact Point

Contact Points serve as the point of attachment for one or more platforms. As the lowest level of delineation, contact points should be considered for each brand, skill, or function in an organization.

The defining question is “Should a certain group of people answer these conversations?” When the answer is yes, a new contact point should be created.

A contact point may have multiple platforms (SMS, web chat, Facebook, etc.) attached, so long as these all support the same function.

Multiple phone numbers may be associated to a given contact point, but other platforms only support a single registration (e.g. an organization with multiple Facebook pages would need a separate contact point for each page).

Queue

Queues are simply aggregation containers for 0 or more contact points. All conversations are routed to a queue.

Queues receiving conversations from at least one contact point may be referred to as “process” queues. Those queues with no contact points directed to them will only receive conversations via re-queue operations and may be referred to as “escalation” queues. Consider escalation queues when a group of agents would address conversations that were first processed by a different group of agents or a bot. If the system has no explicit direction for a conversation, it will be routed to the “Default” queue.

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• A queue created with the same id as a contact point will have that contact point’s conversations routed to it implicitly.

• For other contact points to be routed to a given queue, explicit rules must be applied by a Quiq administrator.

Role

Roles allow conversations from selected queues to be routed to selected agents.

The queues added to the Receive section of a role determine the incoming conversations that are offered to the agents selected.
The Route section indicates to which queues included agents may send conversations.

Note that agents may belong to multiple roles and the permissions granted among the roles are cumulative. An agent will be offered conversations from all the receive queues from each role the agent is a member of. Similarly, an agent may send a conversation to all the route queues from each role the agent is a member of.

Roles may also be used for Outbound permission assignments. Each contact point allows SMS conversations to be started and outbound notifications to be sent by selected Roles. For instances where the Assignment Roles do not match the desired sets of agents, A role may be created with no queues selected, just agents. This Permission Role may be used as a selection for the Outbound and Start Conversation settings on a contact point.

Configuration

The Quiq kickoff call serves as a discovery session that will typically determine the initial state and configuration of these items. As covered above, contact points are defined to address a specific touchpoint defined by brand, product, skill, language, department, etc. Typical configurations may include a Sales and Service contact point for a products company; customer service, lending, and collections contact points for a credit union; multiple language queues for an international software platform. In most of the above cases, each contact point would have a corresponding queue and role. This 1:1:1 configuration provides granularity that can be easily combined by assigning agents to roles. A complex set of roles with multiple queues assigned to each may become difficult to manage over time.

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The Quiq interface currently does not provide for deletion of these items, so consider creation carefully. Note that the ID of these items is persistent, but labels may be changed as needed. Consider creating generic ID’s where labels may require regular changing.

The Hyper 1:1:1 Configuration

Some organizations require that each agent have a dedicated number for texting. In these cases, a role, queue, and contact point should be created with the same (generic) ID. Example: A role, queue, and contact point named Sales 12 are all created. These will have the id of sales-12. When a sales rep is assigned to Sales 12. Change the labels on all three items to reflect the salesperson’s name (Jane Smith). This allows easy determination of the owner of those by other users of the system. When Jane no longer fills this position, change the labels to the name of the new person. Note that this switch leaves the same SMS number in place. If a different number will be used, create new objects (role, queue, and contact point) for the new number and leave the other in place for when/if the old number is re-used.