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Why do customers in a chat queue see their queue position increase instead of decrease?

Environment: 

Oracle B2C Service Console, Customer Portal

Resolution:

The re-sequencing happens during Chat transferring.  Since the position is based on when the chat was requested, some reordering is necessary.  What you are seeing is this:

User 1 requests a chat, in position 1.
User 2 requests a chat, in position 2.
User 3 requests a chat, in position 3.
User 4 requests a chat, in position 4.

Agent One pulls in a chat.  Since the longest in queue is User 1.  Chat exchange happens.  Meanwhile, the queue positions change:

User 2 in position 1
User 3 in position 2
User 4 in position 3

Agent A transfers User 1 to the same queue.  That puts User 1 in position 4, but he's been in the queue the longest, so he's going to get pulled next (like going to the post office and they tell you to fill out a form, step aside, and when you're done you don't need to go to the end of the line again).

Agent B pulls a chat, and gets User 1 (because he's been in the queue the longest).  There is a brief moment there where the chats get reshuffled- where you'll see:

User 2 in position 1
User 3 in position 1
User 4 in position 2

It takes maybe 5 or 10 seconds and the chats are properly re-sequenced.  For example, User 4 will go from being in position 2, back to 3 (because User 1 was actually waiting the longest).  You'll see this a couple times in the video - although the second time you won't see the last re-sequence as I hit my 5 minute time limit.

One option to consider is possibly not including the ${queue-position} from the ChatQueueWaitTime widget's label_estimated_wait_time message base.  It might be a better option if queue wait times are relatively short and the queue count is higher.  This can be added to your chat_landing page:

<rn:widget path="chat/ChatQueueWaitTime" label_queue_position="Some other message or none at all"/>

This way, end users wouldn't see the position.