Hosted PBX Guide

Automatic Call Distribution Queue (ACD Queue) is one of those oddly worded terms that manages to make its way into almost any industry, especially technology-based industries.  While it sounds a bit odd, it gets simple when you get down to brass tacks - it's a system in the PBX that allows customers to be put into on hold until someone in the company can take their call.  It's referred to as a queue because it holds the callers' places in line, each being answered in the order they were received.  And the automatic distribution is there because nobody in the company has to manually connect the busy line - as soon as there's an available phone line the caller is automatically distributed there.

But simplifying the ACD queue like that doesn't really give full credit to what a properly built system is capable of, and how much effort goes into the little details.   A robust ACD queue is critical for any office of more than three people.  First, the system has to know which extensions can take which kind of call - so that if someone presses ‘one' for sales, they actually get to the sales department.  The ACD queue should also have music or a recorded message the caller can listen to while waiting.  And if, in our imaginary sales queue, there are too many callers for the regular sales team to handle, the owner of the system should be able to decide whether additional calls go to voicemail, keep waiting until someone is available, or start getting routed to other employees.  Who gets calls in which order when there's not a backlog of people waiting is also a standard option, so that the system will either balance the workload evenly or prioritize who gets calls based on the owner's preferences and needs.  All of these things should be included in any ACD queue.

There are, however, a great many companies that say they provide a ‘queuing service' that do not actually provide ACD queues.  These crude replacements are referred to in the industry as ‘hunt groups', because all it does is take a list of extension and try calling each one until it gets an answer or gives up.  The quality of these hunt groups varies wildly - some will simply ring through each extension from the one listed first until the last until someone picks up or it goes to voicemail.  This not only means that the first person is always busy while the last is rarely busy, but it also means that the caller has to wait on hold before being connected while busy phones are being called.  A real ACD queue would be able to tell which lines are in use in advance, thus cutting down on this wait time dramatically.  In general, if you need high quality queuing service, make certain you contact the company's customer service and ask them several questions about what they can and cannot provide in this regard.  Of those hosted PBX providers reviewed on this site, on VirtualPBX provides an actual ACD queue - nobody else comes even remotely close.

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