Call Queue setup question for food pantry

I am working with a church that has a food pantry. Here’s what I am trying to do, but with little success:

They have (and only want) one person to answer calls during the pantry hours. People call in to request food and the volunteers take a cart of groceries to the client’s car. So everything is done on the phone.

There is one desk phone in the pantry office area. I want the first call to ring the phone (easy - direct the DID to the subaccount), and subsequent calls (they currently have three lines and keep jumping from call to call to say “please hold”) would be directed to a call queue. I want to limit the queue to 2 callers, for a total of three callers at any time.

They do not want VM or anything else - callers call, and if they get thriough as one of the three callers they get through. Call back and try again if you get a busy signal.

It seems I should direct the DID to a sub account then fallover to the queue when the line is busy and leave the other fallover options set to “none”.

I have messed around with this and came up with several results, the most promising was when the call did ring the desk phone, then the subsequent call went to the queue where the outgoing recording played - and then at the end of the recording the call hung up.

I’m stuck. I am sure there is a simple setting I am missing. Can someone help?

TIA

Hi,
You should look at the “Maximum Callers” parameter. Any caller that dial when the queue is full will be direct to the FULL routing. That routing can then play a message inviting the caller to call back later or choose System event “Busy” to return a busy tone to the caller.

Hello @JeffPB,

Why not simply using a calling queue, period? Like only that?

Set the queue to 3 callers maximum. Have the phone registered on the queue. Then when someone gets in the queue (all calls should directly go to the queue), the phone will ring and pick the calls one after the other.

This will work, super simple, does the job.

Am I missing something? :blush:

Kind regards! <><