Max Calls Method and Action: capping queue size

A queue is only useful up to a point. If three agents are answering and forty people are waiting, the fortieth caller is going to have a miserable experience and probably hang up angry anyway. The Max Calls settings let you draw a line: this in-group will hold at most this many calls, and anything beyond that gets handled gracefully instead of piling on.

Three settings that work together

There are three fields, and they only do something as a set:

• Max Calls Method turns the cap on and decides how to count: either calls in total, or calls per queue.
• Max Calls Count is the actual number. It must be set higher than zero, or the feature does nothing. The default of zero means the cap is off.
• Max Calls Action decides what happens to the calls that exceed the count.

So if you want to cap your support line at, say, twenty waiting calls, you turn on the method, set the count to twenty, and pick where caller number twenty-one should go. Leave the count at zero and none of it activates, which is the most common reason people think the cap is broken when it simply was never switched on.

Where the overflow goes

Calls over the cap are sent to one of three existing routes you have probably already set up. They can go to the drop action, the after-hours action, or the no-agent-no-queue action. By default they go to the no-agent-no-queue action, which usually means a message or voicemail. The nice part is you are reusing routing you already built, so there is no separate overflow message to record.

Capped calls are easy to spot afterward. They are logged with a MAXCAL status and a MAXCALLS hangup reason, so when you look at your reports you can tell exactly which calls were turned away because the queue was full, as opposed to a Abandoned call where the caller hung up on their own.

Picking a sensible number

A good cap is roughly how many callers your team can realistically clear in an acceptable wait time. If your agents close out calls quickly, you can hold more; if calls run long, a smaller cap protects the people in line from a wait so long they would have been better off getting a callback. Tie the number to your real Talk time rather than guessing, and revisit it as your headcount changes.

The Max Calls cap pairs well with the no-agent safeguards on the same Ingroup, which catch the empty-queue case while Max Calls catches the overfull one. For the empty-queue side, see the No Agent No Queue Action. The full inbound call handling guide ties them together, and if you are sizing the server behind all this, our plans page has the numbers.