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The billing team gets billing calls; everyone else gets the rest
One team owns its own queues. A catch-all rotation picks up everything else.
This is for contact centers where a specialist team, such as billing, wants to hear about its own queues and nothing else, while a general on-call rotation looks after the rest. When you're done, a problem on the Billing queue pages the billing team, and a problem anywhere else pages the general rotation. It works on every plan.
What you'll set up
- A Billing team rotation that covers the Billing queue.
- A General rotation that covers every queue. This is your catch-all.
- Alert rules set to page Whoever covers the queue, so each problem goes to the team that owns its queue.
Steps
- Create the billing team's rotation. Go to On-call → Rotations and choose New rotation. Set it up as usual (see Rotations). Under What this rotation is paged about, choose Choose queues and tick Billing. Queues come from Amazon Connect, and one marked not seen recently hasn't reported for over a week.
- Create the catch-all. Make a second rotation, General, and choose Every queue. As the form says, queues created later are covered too, so a queue added next month already has a team.
- Don't carve Billing out of General. You don't need to take Billing off General. When two rotations claim a queue, the more specific one wins. A rotation naming one queue beats one naming several, and Every queue only gets what nobody else claimed.
- Let your rules follow the queue. In Rules, create or edit a rule and leave Pages set to Whoever covers the queue, the default. A rule set to Every queue under On which queue then pages the billing team about Billing and General about everything else. You don't need a separate rule for each queue, though you can have one. See Alert rules.
- Check the cards. On On-call → Rotations, open each rotation. Paged about: shows its queues, and the line below it names the rules that would call it.
The catch-all matters for another reason too. Standby's own workspace-wide incidents, such as figures from Amazon Connect stopping, go to the Every queue rotation unless you choose another one in Readiness.
Try it safely first
- Go to Rules → Simulate. Choose Billing as the Queue, a Metric and a Value that would set off your rule, and choose Show what would happen. You should see Handled by Billing team.
- Try again with another queue. It should say Handled by General.
- The simulator only shows steps for live rules. For a rule still in its shadow week, read the preview under Audit → Practice drill instead, without booking it. See Practice drills.
Variations
- A team with several queues. Tick them all under Choose queues. A team covering one queue still wins over a team covering several.
- The billing team only works days. Set their rotation to Business hours only. Standby only picks a rotation that's on duty, so out of hours, Billing problems go to General. See A day team and a night team on the same queues.
- One rule for one team, on purpose. Set Pages to a named rotation. That rule always pages that rotation, even if another team covers the queue, and when it's off duty, nobody is paged.
- General backs up billing (Business). On the billing team's rotation, set If nobody answers → Then ring to General. See Two people take turns, and a third backs them up.