Queues and Transfers

Overview

The Queues and Transfers page controls which Amazon Connect queues appear in CX, and which contact flows are used when an interaction is transferred. It is available at Contact Centre > Configuration > Queues and Transfers in the NeonNow Admin app.

CX avoids manual management of quick connects within Amazon Connect by dynamically creating queue and agent quick connects. This keeps transfer destinations largely maintenance-free, but there is still often a need to narrow the queues agents can see, and to run custom logic on a transfer. The sections below follow the panels on the page, in the order they appear.

External Number Transfer Flow

A transfer to an external phone number does not trigger a contact flow by default, so custom logic such as a do-not-call check cannot run. Enabling External Number Transfer Flow routes those transfers through a contact flow of your choosing instead.

See External Number Transfer Flow for what the selected flow must do and how the dialled number is passed to it.

Hidden Queues Prefix

Contact centres often carry queues that exist only to support routing, and that agents should never see. Set a Hidden Queues Prefix and any queue whose name starts with that prefix is hidden everywhere in CX, including queue transfers and real-time metrics.

Only the start of the queue name is matched. With a prefix of ACME_Internal_, the queues ACME_Internal_Overflow and ACME_Internal_Callback are both hidden, while ACME_Sales and Overflow_ACME_Internal are not.

When no prefix is set, the panel reports that no queues are currently hidden.

note

Hiding a queue removes it from real-time metrics as well as from transfers, so a hidden queue that still receives interactions is no longer visible to supervisors.

Transfer Flows

Two contact flows can be selected here, and they are used for every dynamically created quick connect:

• The agent flow, used when an agent is added to a call, an interaction is transferred to an agent, or an agent task is created for an agent.
• The queue flow, used when a queue is added to a call, an interaction is transferred to a queue, or an agent task is created for a queue.

Choose a flow from each dropdown to replace the default. If a flow created recently in Amazon Connect does not appear in the dropdown, use the refresh action to reload the list.

Changing a flow applies to quick connects created from that point onwards. See Transfer Contact Flows for more detail on how the flows are used.

Queue Allowlist

The Queue Allowlist is where you choose the core queues your agents work from. When the allowlist is set, only those queues appear anywhere in CX, in place of every queue that exists in Amazon Connect. When it is empty, the full Amazon Connect queue list is used.

Each queue in the allowlist can also carry an optional description, which is shown to agents under the queue name in queue selectors — for example when transferring an interaction or creating an agent task.

Reading the Allowlist

The read-only view lists each allowlisted queue as a badge:

• A plain badge — the queue is available and has no description.
• A badge with an information icon — the queue has a description, which is shown when the icon is used.
• A red badge — the queue is no longer usable. It is prefixed with Disabled: when the queue has been disabled in Amazon Connect, and Deleted: when it no longer exists there.

A red badge means agents can no longer be routed or transferred to that queue, so remove it from the allowlist or restore the queue in Amazon Connect.

Editing the Allowlist

Select the edit action to change the allowlist. Each row has:

• A queue dropdown, listing the queues available in your Amazon Connect instance.
• An optional description for that queue.
• A remove action, which takes the queue out of the allowlist.

Use Add Queue to add another row, and the refresh action to reload the queue dropdown if a queue created recently in Amazon Connect is missing. Select Save to apply the allowlist, or Cancel to discard the changes.

Descriptions Are a Point-in-Time Snapshot

Selecting a queue that already has a description in Amazon Connect fills the description in for you, but the value is stored here as a snapshot taken at that moment.

Editing the description in Amazon Connect afterwards does not update it in CX. To change what agents see, edit the description on this page.

Queue Filters

Queue Filters narrow the queues shown for a single interaction type. A regular expression pattern can be set for each of Agent Task, Chat, Email and Voice. Enter the pattern on its own — surrounding slashes are not required, so use ^.+_voice$ rather than /^.+_voice$/.

Queue filters apply where an agent picks a queue: queue transfers and agent task creation. They do not change how interactions are routed to queues, and unlike the queue allowlist and the hidden queues prefix they do not apply everywhere in CX. See How the Filters Combine for how they sit alongside the other controls.

A pattern works in two directions, and the second direction is the part that is easy to miss:

• It selects the queues shown for its own interaction type — only queues matching the pattern are offered.
• It removes those same queues from every other interaction type, including interaction types that have no pattern of their own.

The effect is that a pattern reserves the queues it matches for one interaction type. Queues are therefore split between interaction types rather than shared, without needing a pattern for each type.

Worked Example

Take a contact centre with four queues — ACME_Sales_voice, ACME_Support_voice, ACME_Sales_chat and ACME_General — and a single pattern of ^.+_voice$ set on Voice:

Interaction type	Queues shown
Voice	ACME_Sales_voice and ACME_Support_voice
Chat	ACME_Sales_chat and ACME_General
Email	ACME_Sales_chat and ACME_General
Agent Task	ACME_Sales_chat and ACME_General

Chat, Email and Agent Task have no pattern set, so they would otherwise show all four queues. The two _voice queues are removed from them because the Voice pattern claimed those queues.

The pattern that applies is the one for the type of task the agent is picking a queue for, not the interaction they happen to be handling at the time. An agent creating an agent task while on a voice call is therefore filtered by the Agent Task pattern, so in the example above they see ACME_Sales_chat and ACME_General rather than the two _voice queues.

Only interaction types with a pattern set are listed in the read-only view.

Restricting Transfer Queues

Queue filters apply to every interaction of a given type. To restrict the transfer queues for a single interaction instead, set the contact attribute NEONNOW_AVAILABLE_TRANSFER_QUEUE_ARNS on the contact in an Amazon Connect contact flow.

The value is a comma-separated list of the queue ARNs the agent is offered as valid queue transfer destinations. The attribute can be:

• Not passed at all — the key is not in the contact attributes.
• Empty ('').
• One queue ARN.
• Multiple queue ARNs, delimited by a comma.

Behaviour:

• If the attribute is not provided, all queues are shown.
• If the attribute is provided but the value is empty, the transfer-to-queue button is disabled, with a tooltip explaining why.
• If the attribute is provided, the available queues are filtered to the ARNs given. Any invalid ARN, or one that does not match an available queue, is ignored.
• If every ARN provided is invalid, or no available queues remain, the transfer button and modal are still shown, with a disabled queue dropdown reading There are no valid, available queues and additional help text below it.

This attribute applies to queue transfers only. It does not restrict the queues an agent can choose when creating an agent task.

tip

Operational Parameters can be used to store the values of transfer queues. The Queue type of operational parameter allows for multi-selects, which creates a comma-separated list. See Operational Parameters.

Hiding Transfer Options

The queue filters and the attribute above narrow which queues an agent can transfer to. To take a transfer option away from the agent altogether, set the contact attribute NEONNOW_CONTACT_HIDE_TRANSFER on the contact in an Amazon Connect contact flow. The options it covers are hidden on that interaction only.

The value sets what is hidden:

• ALL — every transfer option.
• QUEUE — transfers to a queue.
• AGENT — transfers to an agent.
• NUMBER — transfers to an external number.

Several values can be set at once as a comma-separated list, so QUEUE,NUMBER hides transfers to a queue and to an external number while leaving transfers to an agent available. Spaces around each value are ignored, but a comma is the only separator, so QUEUE NUMBER matches nothing and hides nothing. The values are case sensitive and must be upper case, and a value that is not one of the four above is ignored.

The two per-interaction attributes do different jobs. NEONNOW_AVAILABLE_TRANSFER_QUEUE_ARNS changes which queues appear in the queue transfer list, whereas NEONNOW_CONTACT_HIDE_TRANSFER removes the transfer control itself, leaving the agent no list to choose from.

For the full list of contact attributes you can set in a contact flow, see Contact Attributes.

How the Filters Combine

Where more than one of these controls is in play, they apply in order, starting from every queue in your Amazon Connect instance:

1. The queue allowlist — if set, only allowlisted queues continue.
2. The hidden queues prefix — any queue whose name starts with the prefix is removed.
3. The queue filter for the interaction type — the pattern for that type selects its queues, and patterns set on other types remove theirs.
4. NEONNOW_AVAILABLE_TRANSFER_QUEUE_ARNS — on a queue transfer, the queues are narrowed to the ARNs on the contact.

Each step only ever narrows the list. A queue removed by an earlier step cannot be added back by a later one, so a queue left out of the allowlist never appears, whatever the queue filters match.

If the combination leaves no queues at all, the result stays empty. It does not fall back to the full Amazon Connect queue list, so an over-narrow set of rules shows agents an empty queue selector rather than every queue.

NEONNOW_CONTACT_HIDE_TRANSFER sits outside this order, because it hides the transfer control rather than narrowing a list. Where it hides queue transfers, the agent never reaches a queue selector at all, whatever the steps above resolve to.

The controls also differ in how far they reach:

Control	Where it applies
Queue allowlist	Everywhere in CX
Hidden queues prefix	Everywhere in CX
Queue filters	Queue transfers and agent task creation
NEONNOW_AVAILABLE_TRANSFER_QUEUE_ARNS	Queue transfers only