One queue for every channel: why a channel isn't a department
When every channel gets its own inbox, residents wait in the wrong one. Here's how Kav's agent desk queues conversations by department, not by the app they came from.
A city that adds a channel — website chat, Telegram, WhatsApp — tends to add an inbox with it: one team answers on the website, another on WhatsApp. A year later there are five inboxes, and a resident who switches channel starts their story from the beginning.
The rule
In Kav's agent desk, a channel is not a queue. Conversations are queued by department — the city call centre, collections, welfare — and the channel they arrived on is just one property of the conversation. You can filter by it to look, but the filter is display only: an agent never needs to know where a conversation came from to answer it.
What an agent sees, and what they don't
- Search runs on the server, over the whole queue — not just what has loaded on screen.
- An agent sees only the conversations their department's permissions allow. When something is withheld, the screen says what and why, instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
- The conversation arrives with everything said so far, so the resident never repeats themselves.
Inside the CRM too
The very same queue appears in a side pane inside Microsoft Dynamics 365. An agent who lives in the CRM all day takes a conversation without leaving the record they're working on — and without a sixth inbox.