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When editing a profile, what are the pull policy, pull limit, and inbox limit?

Environment:

Profiles, Queues

Resolution:

When you have one or more queues defined for use with incidents, the Service tab in a profile includes several additional fields, namely: Queue, Pull Policy, Pull Limit, and Inbox Limit. These fields allow you to define a pull policy for your staff members that allows agents to pull unresolved, unassigned incidents from specific queues to be assigned to them.

When a pull policy is defined in the staff profile, a Fill Inbox option displays for the staff members using that profile.  The Fill Inbox button displays on the Home tab for an incident report generated within the console. The Fill Inbox button does not display on the Incident tab of another record, for example, opening a contact record and clicking the Incidents tab. 
 
The fields that affect the pull policy are defined below:

	Incident Queues: This table defines which queues the staff member can pull incidents from. Only incidents that are not assigned to a staff member and that have an unresolved status type can be pulled into a staff member's incident inbox. You can include multiple queues from which staff members can pull incidents.
	Pull Policy: This field specifies the priority for pulling incidents from the Incident Queues above. You can set the pull policy to be Strict Priority, First Due, or Manual. Strict priority: The strict priority pull policy uses the order of the queues within Incident Queues to determine which queue to pull incidents from. Incidents are pulled from the first queue in the list until that queue is empty and then incidents are pulled from the next highest queue, and so on. First due: This pull policy uses the incident's due date to determine which incidents to pull. Incidents with the earliest due dates are pulled first from all queues that are available to the agent -- even if that date and time has already passed. The queue ranking and priority do not affect this pull policy. Due dates are set based on the system default response requirements or by response requirements set in a service level agreement (SLA) that is applied to the incident. For more information on incident due dates, refer to Answer ID 2215: How an incident's due date is calculated. Manual: This pull policy allows agents to manually pull incidents from any queue that is available to them. Agents can specify which queue to pull from. Incidents are pulled from the selected queue by the due date.
	Pull Quantity: The pull quantity defines the number of incidents that will be added to the staff member's Inbox when the agent clicks the Fill Inbox / Fill button. If the agent hits their Inbox Limit, no additional incidents will be pulled to exceed that limit.
	Inbox Limit: This value specifies the maximum number of incidents with an unresolved status type that can be assigned to a staff member. This includes incidents that are assigned to the Unresolved and Updated statuses, as well as incidents that are assigned to a custom status that has an Unresolved status type.  The 'Inbox Limit' field within an Account Profile only controls the 'Fill Inbox' functionality, and does not control incidents from appearing in an Agents queue if they are updated or if they are manually assigned to that Agent. For example, an Agent could have their 'Inbox Limit' set to 5, but have 20 incidents out which are currently assigned to said Agent and waiting on a customer response.  If all 20 of those customers update their incidents at once, the incidents will still appear in the Agents Inbox, because they have already been assigned to that Agent. In addition, it is still possible to manually assign an incident to an Agent even if the Agent has 5 or more incidents currently in their inbox.  The 'Inbox Limit' field only controls the Agent's ability to fill their own inbox, and will not allow them to pull any more incidents themselves by clicking on the 'Fill Inbox' button if their inbox already contains the number of incidents which has been set in the 'Inbox Limit' field.

Note:  Pull Policy, Pull Quantity and Inbox Limit are ignored for Round Robin (All) queue type incident assignment.

For more information regarding these permissions under Chat service permissions:
Answer ID 8179: Understanding Chat Permissions: Chat Queue Pull Policy
Answer ID 8178: Understanding Chat Permissions: Pull Chat Mode and Push Mode

See also, the 'Service permissions' section in online documentation for the version your site is currently running.  For more information on editing profiles, refer to the 'Customizing profiles' section.  To access Oracle B2C Service manuals and documentation online, refer to the Documentation for Oracle B2C Service Products.