Chapter 13. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) Queues

An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.

—George Mikes

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), or call queuing, provides a way for a PBX to queue up incoming calls from a group of users: it aggregates multiple calls into a holding pattern and assigns each call a rank that determines the order in which that call should be delivered to an available agent (typically, first in first out). When an agent becomes available, the highest-ranked caller in the queue is delivered to that agent, and everyone else moves up a rank.