Home / Docs / Voice & Calling / Call Queues (ACD)
A call queue answers everybody, holds them in order, and rings your team one caller at a time. Nobody hears a busy signal, nobody lands in voicemail while three people are free, and nobody has to remember whose turn it is.
The queue runs on your own Twilio or Telnyx account, not on TelBuddy. Your caller waits on your carrier's infrastructure, hears hold music served by your carrier, and is connected by your carrier. TelBuddy decides who to ring and when, and stays out of the audio path entirely.
That matters for two reasons. Call quality is whatever your carrier gives you, with no extra hop in the middle. And if TelBuddy is unreachable for a moment, a caller already on hold stays on hold rather than being dropped.
Queues work identically on Twilio and on Telnyx. Nothing in this article is carrier specific.
Open Voice Settings, pick a number, and set Voice Mode to Call Queue (ACD). Save, and the queue is created.
You then have four things to set:
Queue name. Only for your own reference, but give it a real one. "Support" and "Sales" are useful in a dropdown; two queues both called "Call Queue" are not.
Greeting. Spoken once, before the caller enters the queue. Leave it blank to send them straight to hold music.
Hold music. Callers hear this on a loop. There are four ready made tracks, or paste the URL of your own MP3 or WAV. Your own file is better: it is your brand, and it is served from somewhere you control.
Maximum wait. How long somebody may hold before the fallback takes over. This is the number people set too high. Five minutes of hold music is a long time when you are the one holding.
Under Agents, add a team member and the phone number to ring. Any phone works. A mobile is fine, and there is nothing to install.
Every agent starts offline and is only rung once set available. That is deliberate. A queue that rings a phone nobody is holding is worse than no queue at all, because the caller waits through the full ring before anything else happens.
An agent is only ever offered one call. While they are talking, the queue skips them. When the call ends they get a cool-off period, thirty seconds by default, before they can be rung again.
That cool-off is not padding. It is the difference between a job somebody can do all day and a phone that rings the instant they hang up.
When the queue rings an agent, they hear who is calling and press 1 to take it. Only then are they connected.
This exists because a mobile voicemail picks up faster than a person does. Without the keypress, a caller who waited four minutes gets handed to somebody's voicemail greeting, and the queue believes the call was answered. A voicemail box cannot press 1, so it cannot steal the call.
Keep ring each agent for under about twenty seconds for the same reason.
Anyone who misses three calls in a row is set offline automatically, and the team list says so.
This is the single most useful rule in the system. Without it, one person who left their phone in a drawer silently absorbs a share of every caller, and the only symptom is that your queue feels slow.
Four options, and the right one depends on whether you care more about speed or about your carrier bill.
Round robin rings one agent at a time, longest idle first. Work is shared out evenly and each call costs one leg.
Priority also rings one at a time, but in the order you set. Your senior people get first refusal and everyone else is overflow.
Ring all at once rings every available agent simultaneously and the first to press 1 wins. Fastest for the caller. It also places one billable call leg per agent, and only one of them connects.
Ring the top tier at once blasts your best people together, then falls back to the next tier if nobody takes it.
Ringing everyone is the natural first choice and the one worth thinking twice about. On a four person team it is four legs per call, on every call, including the ones that are abandoned.
If nobody takes the call before your maximum wait, the caller goes wherever you choose:
The AI receptionist is the strongest option if you have the add-on, because the caller still gets a conversation rather than a beep.
Queue to queue overflow is capped at three queues per caller. Two queues pointing at each other cannot trap somebody in a loop.
A queue is not only a mode for a whole number. It is a destination other things can point at.
From a phone menu. In the call flow builder, set any option to Call Queue and pick the queue. "Press 2 for support" can drop the caller straight into the support queue, with no transfer to another number and no second call leg.
From the AI receptionist. A transfer rule can name a queue, so a caller who tells the AI they need a person is put in line rather than dialled out to a desk phone. See AI transfer destinations.
From another queue. As overflow, above.
A queue belongs to your account, not to one phone number, so any number's menu can point at any of your queues. One support queue can sit behind five different product lines.
The Queue monitor button opens a wallboard that refreshes every five seconds:
You can also set an agent available or offline straight from the board. Leave it open on a second screen and you can see a queue backing up while there is still time to do something about it.
If you have several queues, the board shows all of them at once, and the Showing dropdown switches to any single one.
Ringing everyone costs one leg per agent. On an abandoned call you billed four legs and connected nobody.
Agents must set themselves available. Being logged into TelBuddy is not the same as being ready to take calls, and a browser tab left open overnight is not a person.
Voicemail on an agent's mobile is the enemy of a queue. Keep the ring time short and leave press-to-accept on.
Set a realistic maximum wait. Two minutes with a good fallback beats ten minutes of hold music.