Create and configure queues

Last Update: Nov 2024 • Est. Read Time: 5 MIN
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Routing lets you get customer inquiries and tasks from internal teams to the right agent. You can automatically route tasks and conversations from any channel to available agents with queues. Queues can be seen as buckets, or containers, which hold conversations waiting to be assigned to an agent based on criteria you set through queue rules

Queues can be prioritized so that you can determine which conversations are of higher priority and should be routed to an agent first. You can also control the weight or size of a conversation in a queue, which ensures agents can focus on the important conversations in their inbox.

Who can access this feature?
User typesAdmins can access the Routing page.


In this article

Create a queue

A default queue is preconfigured and cannot be edited or deleted. This default helps ensure that any conversation that doesn't match one of your queue rules is still assigned to a queue. 

When you add a queue, you can be guided through configuring a new queue using our setup wizard or set up the queue manually.

To create a queue with the setup wizard:

  1. Go to Settings> Platform > Routing.
  2. Select Add Queue and choose Configure the basics from the window that opens.
  3. Follow the remaining steps in the setup wizard to be guided through creating a new queue.

The guided setup will allow you to specify the name, description, priority, and conversation weight of a new queue, set up a queue rule, and assign teams to the queue.

Note: If you create a queue rule in the wizard, you must activate the rule to route conversations to queues. To do this, go to Settings > Platform > Routing, choose the Rules tab, and then turn on the toggle next to the rule.

For advanced users who prefer to create a rule without additional guidance, we also still offer a manual setup option. The manual setup will only create the queue and will not configure any rules or team assignments.

To create a queue manually:

  1. Go to Settings> Platform > Routing.
  2. Select Add Queue and choose Set Up Manually from the window that opens.
  3. Enter the following information:
    • Queue Name is the internal name of the queue.
    • Queue Display Name is the name your customers will see when asked to pre-select a queue in a chat conversation.
    • Queue Description provides context on how the queue is used.
  4. Enter a value for Queue Priority. For more information, see Understand queue priority.
  5. Select Save Changes.

Advanced queue configurations

You can set more advanced settings for your queues with the following options.

  • Queue Key Name
    With queue keys, you can assign similar conversations to a queue using conversation or customer attributes in their raw format. If you are creating this queue to use with a queue key, enter the queue's name in this box.

  • Restrict User Transfers
    Turn this option on to prevent users from manually transferring conversations into this queue. For more information on how users can manually transfer a conversation to a queue, see Conversation Details.

    Note: Workflows and queue rules are not affected by this setting and will continue to assign conversations into this queue.

  • Conversation Weight
    You can also specify the weight of the conversations going into that specific queue.

    Conversation weight is the total allocation of space that the conversation will take up in an agent's inbox. Think of this number as the size of the conversation. How many conversations an agent will be allowed to view will depend on the size of their inbox (capacity) and the size of the conversations being routed to them. Conversation weight can be any number between 1 and 100.

    Conversation weight assignments only take effect when the conversation enters a queue. If you change the conversation weight in the Queue settings after the conversation enters the queue, the conversation will continue to reflect the original weight.

    Think of a moving truck to better understand the concept of conversation weight. Let's say that your truck has a total capacity of 10. If each one of your packing boxes has a weight (total allocation of space) of 2, the moving truck will only be able to fit 5 boxes at a time since it will reach capacity once the weight in it reaches 10.

Delete a queue

You have the option to delete queues if they are no longer needed. To delete a queue, you will first need to:

  1. Delete queue rules associated with the queue.
  2. Remove all conversations from that queue.
  3. Remove any work items that were left in a queued state.

1. Delete queue rules

All queue rules associated with the queue you are deleting must be deleted first. You will see a notification alerting you of this if you try to delete a queue that still has a queue rule assigned to it.

The rules associated with a queue can be seen in the Queue Rules column.

To delete a rule:

  1. Go to Settings> Platform > Routing and choose the Rules tab.
  2. Select Edit Rule  for the rule to be deleted.  
  3. Select Delete in the bottom left corner of the screen and then confirm that you want to delete the rule permanently.

2. Remove conversations from a queue

All conversations must be removed from the queue. Before the queue can be deleted, any conversations in it must be moved to another queue or deleted. To find conversations in a queue, create a search to locate all conversations in the queue (see Create and edit searches). 

For search criteria in the Conditions section, select Conversation > Queue > is equal to and select the queue you will delete from the remaining dropdown. See example below:

Conversations currently in that queue will populate the space below. Click Save in the lower right corner of the Conditions section. This will enable bulk actions to select all the conversations and transfer them to another queue.

Click the Assignicon select a queue to move the conversations to in the Transfer to a Queue section.

Once you've cleared the queue of assigned rules and conversations, you can delete the queue by returning to Settings> Platform > Routing and selecting Delete .

3. Remove all work items in the queue

You may already be able to remove the queue after steps 1 and 2, but in some cases, you may still see an error that Queue deletion failed. Cannot delete a queue that contains queued conversations.

This is usually caused by work items that were left in a queued state. To resolve this scenario, you need to query the queue's endpoint for work-items with a status of queued and find the associated conversations. Once you identify the conversations, you can resolve the leftover items.

To find the work items in a queued status, use the following endpoint query to return all work items that have their status set to completed:

/v1/routing/queues/queueId/work-items?status=queued

Next, review any work items returned in this endpoint query to identify the associated conversations. Inspect the work item for the conversation ID.

Once all the conversations have been identified, cycle the status of each returned conversation to resynchronize the work items and change the status from queued. You can cycle the status by:

  • Reopening the conversation and marking it done again
  • Canceling a snooze, then snoozing the conversation again

After all the applicable conversations have had their status cycled and all the work-items' statuses have been reset, the queue should be ready for deletion.

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