I’m a supervisor for a team of 30 agents. Our ‘Agent Idle Time’ has spiked by 15% this week, but our ‘Average Speed to Answer’ is also increasing. Usually, if agents are idle, calls should be answered faster.
I suspect our new ‘Bullseye Routing’ configuration is the culprit. We have 3 rings with 60-second timeouts. If a call is sitting in ‘Ring 1’ waiting for a specific skill, but my available agents are in ‘Ring 3’ (because they lack that skill), they show as ‘Idle’ on my dashboard while the customer is still ‘Waiting’ in Ring 1.
Is there a way in the Performance views to see which agents could have taken a call if the bullseye ring had expanded sooner? I need to prove that our ring timeouts are too long.
This is exactly why we stopped using Bullseye for our high-volume queues. You’re essentially creating ‘Silos’ of idle agents within a single queue.
In the ‘Queue Activity’ view, look at the ‘Waiting’ interactions and compare their ‘Wait Time’ to the ‘Ring Timeout’ settings. If you see calls consistently waiting for 59 seconds and then being answered the moment they hit the 60-second mark, that’s your proof. The ‘Idle’ agents were sitting there the whole time, but the routing engine wasn’t allowed to ‘see’ them until the ring expanded.
As a veteran architect, I always recommend the ‘Abandonment rate by ring’ report. You can pull this via the Analytics API by grouping by routingRing. If Ring 1 has a high abandon rate and Ring 3 has a high answer rate with 0 wait time after the 120s mark, your rings are definitely too slow.
Use the GET /api/v2/analytics/queues/observations endpoint to see the real-time distribution of available agents across rings. If Ring 1 has 0 agents and Ring 3 has 10, and you have 5 calls waiting… well, the math speaks for itself!
We had this with our callback implementation. We found that shortening the rings to 15 seconds improved our ‘Total Occupancy’ and reduced idle time significantly.
One tip: if you use ‘Bullseye’ to ensure high-skill agents get the first crack at a call, consider using ‘Best Available’ routing instead with ‘Skill Weights’. It allows the system to consider all agents simultaneously but prioritizes the high-skilled ones, eliminating the ‘Idle Silo’ problem of Bullseye rings.