Queue

Routing is deciding which agent, team, or AI agent receives a contact, based on intent, language, skill, customer tier, and availability. Accurate routing is the cheapest available reduction in handle time, because a misrouted contact pays the cost of being read and reassigned twice.

Abandonment rate is the share of customers who leave a queue, chat, or callback line before ever reaching an agent. Contact centres track it alongside wait time because abandonment climbs sharply once queues pass a customer’s patience threshold, making it an early signal that staffing or deflection is not keeping pace with demand.

Backlog is the set of unresolved tickets carried past their target response window. A growing backlog signals that arrival rate has outpaced capacity, and because ageing tickets attract follow-up contacts, backlog tends to generate additional volume rather than simply waiting quietly to be cleared later.

Triage is sorting incoming contacts by intent, urgency, and value before they are worked, so the most consequential conversations reach the right place first. Automated triage now performs the classification step, leaving prioritisation rules and exception handling as the main human contribution.