What Queue Priority does when agents handle calls and email

An agent in VICIdial often handles more than one thing at once: inbound calls, and emails from one or more email groups. When several items could go to the same agent, something has to decide the order. That is the job of the Queue Priority field on each email group.

How precedence works

Queue Priority defines the order in which emails from one group are answered relative to calls or emails from other inbound groups. It is a single number per group. If you set an email group's priority even one digit higher than the campaign, the ingroups, or the other email groups an agent is logged into, that group always takes precedence.

That last point is the one to remember. The threshold is tiny. One digit is enough to make a group win every time, so this is a blunt lever, not a gentle balance. It is separate from Next Agent Email, which decides which agent gets the item; Queue Priority decides which item wins when several are waiting for the same agent.

Keeping those two settings straight saves a lot of confusion. Next Agent Email answers the question who, by sorting the available agents. Queue Priority answers the question what, by deciding which waiting item is offered first when an agent frees up. You can tune them independently: an email group can use an even-spread routing method and still sit at a higher priority than your calls, or vice versa.

When to raise it

Use Queue Priority deliberately, because it overrides everything below it:

• Raise it for an email group whose messages are time sensitive and must jump ahead of routine calls.
• Leave it level with the others when you want email and calls to compete fairly for an agent's attention.
• Avoid setting several groups high, since one digit is the whole difference and stacking them just creates a new pecking order.

A common pattern is to keep most groups at the same baseline number and lift only the one group that genuinely cannot wait, such as a complaints or escalations inbox. That way the rest of your traffic competes normally and the urgent group still jumps ahead whenever one of its emails is sitting in front of an available agent.

flowchart TD
  A["Agent becomes available"] --> B["Items waiting: calls and email groups"]
  B --> C{"Compare Queue Priority"}
  C -->|Email group higher| D["Email group wins"]
  C -->|Equal| E["Normal ordering applies"]
  C -->|Email group lower| F["Calls or other group win"]
  D --> G["Item routed to agent"]
  E --> G
  F --> G

Queue Priority and Next Agent Email solve different problems, so set them together. Once you have decided precedence here, choose how the winning item is assigned in Next Agent Email routing, and if fairness across agents is the goal, compare oldest-wait versus fewest-emails. The inbound email and chat guide puts these pieces in order.

Priority shapes the order an Agent sees work from a Campaign or an Ingroup, much like the Queue priority concept used for inbound calls. When the agent finishes, they apply a Disposition and the next item is chosen. To run VICIdial inbound email on a managed box without the setup overhead, see our pricing page.