Prioritizing how calls reach your agents helps you reduce wait times, protect conversion rates, and ensure your best agents handle the most critical customer conversations.
Strategic impact: Thoughtful agent prioritization can increase booking and payment success rates, reduce abandon and escalation risk, and protect service quality during peak volume. Poorly maintained settings can create longer queues, uneven workloads, and missed revenue opportunities.
Overview
Agent Queue Prioritization lets Call Center Managers rank each agent’s priority in every queue. Inbound calls and callbacks are then presented based on that ranking and agent availability (1 = prioritized first, 5 = prioritized last). This applies to both new and existing queues created with prioritization enabled.
Agent Queue Prioritization is available when you create call queues, edit call queues, or update existing queues with agent prioritization.
When to use agent queue prioritization
High call volume periods: Route calls to your most efficient agents first to keep handle times and wait times low.
Specialized queues: Prioritize agents with specific expertise (e.g., move-ins, collections, commercial accounts) so callers reach the right resource faster.
New hire ramp: Send more calls to experienced agents while newer team members shadow or handle lower-risk interactions.
Performance management: Reward top performers with higher-priority routing and adjust rankings as performance or staffing changes.
How agent queue prioritization works
Assign a priority rank to each agent in a queue. For every queue, you can set a priority value for each agent (1–5). Lower numbers receive calls first.
System checks availability and rank. When a call or callback enters the queue, Storable CRM checks which agents are available and selects the highest-priority (lowest-number) agent.
Calls flow based on your rankings. As agents become busy or available, the system continuously uses your rankings to decide who receives the next interaction.
This creates a consistent, predictable routing strategy that you can adjust at any time as staffing, performance, or business needs change.
Set up agent queue prioritization
Contact your CSM to enable Agent Queue Prioritization.
Create a new queue with prioritization
Go to your call queue configuration to create a call queue.
Add agents to the queue as usual.
For each agent, assign a priority value (1–5), where 1 is routed first, and 5 is routed last.
Review the overall ranking to ensure your best-fit agents are at the top.
Save the queue to activate the prioritization settings.
Learn more in our help article Create Prioritized Call Queues
Edit an existing queue with prioritization
Open the queue you want to edit.
Review the agents listed for that queue.
Update each agent’s priority value based on performance, expertise, and staffing plans.
Confirm that at least one backup agent is ranked close behind your top agents for coverage.
Save your changes to apply the updated prioritization.
Learn in our help article Edit Prioritized Call Queues
Update a legacy queue created before prioritization
Queues created before the Agent Queue Prioritization feature was enabled do not have call priority settings by default. To use prioritization with those queues:
Identify the existing queue that was created before prioritization was activated.
Use the same set of agents to update an existing queue with Agent Prioritization by creating a new, prioritized version of that queue.
Set agent rankings (1–5) for the new queue based on desired routing order.
Redirect relevant call flows to the new prioritized queue.
Monitor performance and fine-tune rankings as needed.
Learn more in our help article How do I add Agent Prioritization to an Existing Queue?
Best practices
Align rankings with your business goals: For example, prioritize upsell experts in sales-focused queues and retention specialists in payment or cancellation queues.
Review rankings regularly: Revisit priorities after staffing changes, new-hire ramp periods, or major performance reviews.
Balance load and burnout: Use priority values to share volume between top performers and strong backups so a small group of agents does not receive every high-intensity call.
Test during off-peak hours: Introduce or adjust prioritization settings when call volume is moderate to safely validate the impact.
Example: Using prioritization to handle peak volume
During peak season, you might set your highest-converting agents as priority 1 in your primary sales queue, followed by experienced agents at priority 2 and newer agents at priority 3–4. When call volumes spike, your best agents receive calls first, stabilizing conversion rates while still giving newer agents opportunities as top-tier agents become busy.
Monitoring and optimization
After you enable Agent Queue Prioritization, track trends such as average handle time, abandonment rates, conversion rates, and escalation volume. Use those insights to adjust rankings and queue design over time.