Managed Contact Center / Queuing & Routing

Priority Queues & Acceleration

You can set some queues — VIP accounts, urgent support, a high-value sales line — to jump ahead of general call traffic. Acceleration adds a second layer of fairness on top of that: the longer any single call waits, the more its priority automatically increases, so a lower-priority caller never gets stuck waiting indefinitely just because higher-priority calls keep arriving.

How does priority actually work between two queues?

You assign each queue a priority “weight.” When agents are shared across queues, calls from the higher-weighted queue are offered first. This lets you guarantee, for example, that a premium-support line is always answered ahead of a general inquiry line, without needing separate staff for each.

What stops a low-priority caller from waiting forever?

Acceleration. As a call sits in a lower-priority queue, the system automatically raises its effective priority the longer it waits, so it eventually competes evenly with — or ahead of — newer higher-priority calls. It’s a built-in fairness mechanism, not something you have to babysit manually.

Do I need separate agents for each priority level?

No. The same agent pool can serve multiple queues at once; priority and ring strategy settings determine which call they’re offered next, not which queue they’re “assigned” to exclusively. See Multi-Queue Agent Membership for how that works.

Can priority change based on time of day or campaign?

Yes — queue priority is a setting you control, so you can raise a queue’s priority during a promotional period or a known high-stakes window (like a billing deadline) and lower it again afterward.

Does this apply to omnichannel messages too, or just phone calls?

The same priority and acceleration logic applies to chat, SMS, and other digital messages routed through a shared queue, not just voice calls — so an urgent chat won’t sit behind lower-priority messages indefinitely either.