Queue Priority: ranking inbound calls against outbound

If you run more than one inbound queue, you eventually hit a fork in the road: two callers are waiting in two different queues, one agent comes free, and both queues want that agent. Queue Priority is the small setting that decides who goes first. It is easy to overlook because the default works fine for a single queue, but the moment you add a second Ingroup, it starts to matter.

What Queue Priority actually decides

Queue Priority is a number you set on each Ingroup. When an agent who is allowed to take calls from several groups becomes available, VICIdial looks at the waiting callers across all of those groups and uses the priority number to break the tie. A caller sitting in a higher-priority queue gets handed to the agent before a caller who has been waiting in a lower-priority one.

The key word is across groups. Within a single queue, the order callers are answered is governed by their Place in line and your routing method, not by this setting. Queue Priority only comes alive when one agent straddles two or more queues.

A concrete example

Say you have a Sales queue and a Support queue, and a handful of senior agents are logged into both. A new sales prospect and an existing customer with a billing question are both on hold. If you give Support a higher priority number, the billing customer is connected first when one of those shared agents frees up, even if the sales prospect technically called in a second earlier.

That is usually what you want. Existing customers waiting on hold are more expensive to lose than a fresh lead, and protecting your Service level on the support line keeps churn down.

Setting it without overthinking it

Resist the urge to give every queue a different priority. If you stagger ten groups across ten numbers, you create a strict pecking order where the bottom queue can starve during a busy stretch. Instead:

• Leave the bulk of your queues at the same default value so they compete fairly.
• Raise the number only for the one or two queues that genuinely must jump ahead.
• Remember a higher number wins; do not assume lower means more important.

If you want to control the order within a single queue rather than between queues, that is a job for your agent routing method instead. We cover the broader picture in our guide to handling inbound calls in VICIdial, and the related Next Agent Call setting decides which agent picks up once priority has chosen the caller.

Queue Priority costs nothing to set and saves you from the awkward situation where your most valuable callers wait behind your least valuable ones. If you are still sizing the queues themselves, our plans spin up a fully configured dialer in under a minute so you can test priorities with real traffic.