Webex Contact Center queues teams and routing strategies

Verified 2026-09-05 · 53 claims · sources tier 2

Also known as BAA, Blended Multimedia Profile, CDG, Capacity Based Team, Dynamic Skills, LAA, SBR.

Webex Contact Center manages contact distribution through structured queues, team configurations, and specific routing strategies 12. These mechanisms determine how incoming contacts match with available agents across different media types and skill profiles 40​25.

How queues and teams operate

In non-skill-based queues with team assignments, teams are combined into Call Distribution Groups (CDGs), where each group represents a level of agents that becomes eligible over configured time intervals 12. If no agent is available in the current Call Distribution Group, a contact parks for a preconfigured duration before the group expands to include the next set of teams, repeating until an agent is found or all groups are exhausted 15. Enabling "Check Agent Availability" in the Queue Contact flow activity causes the contact to instantly expand to the next Call Distribution Group if no matching agent is found in the current group, bypassing the configured wait delay 16. An agent belonging to multiple teams is only counted as part of the Call Distribution Group tied to the team they actively chose at Agent Desktop sign-in 7. Furthermore, an agent-based-assignment queue supports a maximum of 1000 directly assigned agents 6.

When creating a team, administrators choose a Team Type of either Capacity Based (no specific number of agents assigned; used for voice mailboxes or unmanaged agent groups) or Agent Based (a specific number of named agents assigned) 45. A capacity-based team is configured with a Dial Number (DN) to which calls are distributed and a Capacity value specifying how many concurrent calls can be handled at that DN; neither field applies to agent-based teams 13. Legacy documentation from February 2021 notes that because Webex Contact Center disconnects from a call once it transfers to a capacity-based team's Dial Number, it cannot track the contact afterward, detect RONA or call failures, record the call, or report Connect Time or Handled Time, which show as zero in reports 14.

Skill-based routing and profiles

Skill-based queues can be configured in two ways: with skill criteria assigned directly to the queue, or with skill requirements assigned in the flow (a variant of team-assignment queues) 38. In skill-based queues with skill criteria assigned to the queue, any agent who entirely satisfies the queue's skill criteria via their direct skill profile becomes implicitly associated with the queue, and team membership plays no role 40. Updating an agent's skill profile to satisfy a queue's skill criteria—referred to as reskilling—automatically and dynamically adds that agent to the queue's associated agent pool without requiring manual re-assignment 36. WarmTransfer infers that skill-criteria queues are easier to operate at scale than agent-assignment queues, because reskilling updates queue membership automatically while an agent-assignment queue requires an administrator to maintain an ordered list of up to 1000 named agents by hand 39.

Skill relaxation allows a contact's skill requirements to be automatically overwritten with a relaxed, typically broader set of requirements at configured time intervals while the contact waits parked in queue, so that more agents can match 42. This configuration supports multiple sequential steps, each widening the eligible agent pool further as a parked contact approaches its service-level target 44. However, the Skill Requirements, Skill Relaxations, and Check Agent Availability capabilities in the Queue Contact flow activity are only available for queues that use team assignment, and not for skill-criteria-on-queue or agent-assignment queues 43.

A skill profile is a named set of skills, each with an assigned value, assigned either to an agent-based team or to an individual agent 41. When an agent is added to a team, the agent is assigned that team's skill profile, unless a direct skill profile has been configured for the agent individually, which takes precedence 8. A Proficiency skill's value ranges from 0 through 10, representing an agent's level of expertise 27. Dynamic Skills are assigned directly to individual agents and are not assignable through skill profiles 22. Additionally, a skill's "This is a dynamic skill" toggle can be turned on, but once enabled, it cannot be turned back off 21.

Skill-based queues support exactly two agent-selection routing algorithms, configured with the UI abbreviations LAA (Longest Available Agent) and BAA (Best Available Agent) 37. Best Available routing scores each eligible agent by summing the proficiency skill values that matched the contact's skill requirements, routes to the agent with the highest score, and breaks ties by longest-available agent 9. Only proficiency-type skills are used in the Best Available score calculation, whereas boolean, text, and enum skills in the requirement filter eligibility without contributing to the score 26. For Best Available scoring, when a skill requirement uses a less-than-or-equal-to condition, the agent's proficiency value is inverted using the formula effective_skill_value = 10 minus actual_skill_value, so that a lower raw skill value produces a stronger match score 10.

Routing patterns and contact surplus

The Top-Down routing pattern always restarts scanning from the beginning of the configured ordered agent list for every new contact, matching to the first available agent found, unlike Circular which resumes from where it left off 17.

A Contact Surplus Scenario occurs when the number of incoming contacts exceeds available agents, utilizing Queue Ranking, Contact Priority, and Longest Waiting Contact in that order to determine which parked contact an agent who just became available receives next 19. Queue ranking can be applied to a maximum of 50 queues across all media types, with rank values from 1 (highest) to 50, where multiple queues can share the same rank and unranked queues rank lower than any ranked queue 31. Queue ranking applies only within the same media type—meaning a voice queue ranked lower than a chat queue can still route to an agent's voice channel ahead of the chat queue if the agent only became available on voice—and it does not apply to capacity-based teams 30​29. Contact priority ranges from 1 (highest) to 10 (lowest), with contacts queued without an explicit priority defaulting to 10 18.

Multimedia profiles and channel handling

An agent can have at most one voice channel provisioned, but can have up to five channels of each other media type (chat, email, social) via Multimedia Profile configuration 25. In a Blended multimedia profile, the configurable simultaneous-contact ranges are Voice 0-1, and Chat, Email, and Social Channel each 0-5 11. An Exclusive multimedia profile lets an agent handle exactly one contact at a time and uses a fixed channel priority order of voice, then chat, then email, then social, routing a queued voice contact ahead of an already-queued chat contact 23. Multimedia profile precedence dictates that a profile assigned directly to an individual agent overrides one assigned to the agent's team, which overrides the profile assigned to the site 24. The built-in Default_Telephony_Profile is auto-assigned to every site, cannot be edited or deleted, and has Voice=1 and Chat=Email=Social=0, handling only voice calls by default 20.

Activity constraints and API limits

A contact processed by the Queue Contact flow activity is limited to a maximum of 25 entry point and queue transitions 28. When a Queue To Agent activity's preferred agent declines, doesn't answer, or fails to receive the contact, the contact moves to the configured Recovery Queue where it routes to the longest available agent without any skill-based matching applied 35.

The Get Queue Statistics API requires the difference between the to and from query parameters to be less than 24 hours (86,400,000 milliseconds) 32. Its queueIds query parameter accepts a comma-separated list capped at a maximum of 100 queue IDs, and if omitted, all queues for the organization are returned 33. Additionally, the API response field totalAssignedTasks is explicitly marked deprecated and always returns 0 34.

Applicability

• Vendor: Cisco
• Product: Webex Contact Center
• Deployment: Cloud
• Editions covered: Unspecified / standard cloud editions
• Regions covered: Unspecified / global
• Releases covered: Current as of 2026-09-04, with specific legacy exceptions noted from February 2021 and 2023 Control Hub interfaces 12​14​44

What remains uncertain

• Field reports suggest or documentation sources imply historical behaviors around capacity-based teams stem from older architectures, but administrators should verify whether modern platform updates have altered call tracking limitations for dial-number handoffs 14.
• Readers should verify interface labels and behavior for skill relaxation and dynamic skill toggles, as the dynamic skill toggle state is permanently one-way once engaged 21.

WarmTransfer. (2026, September 5). Webex Contact Center queues teams and routing strategies. WarmTransfer. https://warmtransfer.net/knowledge/webex-cc-routing

@misc{warmtransfer-webex-cc-routing,
  title  = {Webex Contact Center queues teams and routing strategies},
  author = {{WarmTransfer}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://warmtransfer.net/knowledge/webex-cc-routing},
  note   = {Verified 2026-09-05}
}