freshcaller

Who can configure it? 

Only an Account admin or admin can setup smart escalations.

What is a ‘smart escalation’?

Smart escalations refers to the fall back options to route calls differently when the usual phone team is unavailable to take calls. 

When do you require smart escalations? 

Smart escalations can come in handy in any of the following scenarios:

1. There are too many missed calls or voicemails

2. Callers find themselves waiting for an agent for long periods of time

3. The wait queue is full

4. There is no one available to pick up the call

How to configure smart escalations? 

1. Before setting up smart escalations you need to setup a call queue. 

2. Once you have setup a call queue, go to Admin > Call Flows. 

3. All the call queues that you have configured would be visible here

4. Hover over the call queue for which you wish to setup smart escalations and select the edit button 

5. You can configure smart escalations for the following scenarios to ensure you don’t miss any calls —

   1. Escalation when your team is online but missing calls: 

Sometimes your agents may forget to change their availability status before leaving their desk for any unplanned meetings or breaks, this results in calls being missed despite your agents being online. In such a situation you can route calls to 

1. Another team, 

2. An external number or

3. The agent’s mobile phone. 

4. You can further configure the caller to leave a voicemail in case the escalated call goes unanswered. 

2. Escalations when your entire team is busy with their current conversations:

If your team is handling a growing customer base, some calls may go unanswered while your agents are talking to other customers. In such cases you can choose to send callers to a queue, to do this simply toggle the place caller in queue button. 

Here you can 

1. Set the maximum queue length, maximum queue length is 20.

2. Decide whether to send callers to another queue/voicemail/hangup if queue is full

3. Play wait message to the caller

4. To let the callers know their queue position you can toggle the append queue position to wait message button 

5. You can also decide how long you want your customers to wait in queue before transferring them to another call queue or sending them to voicemail or leaving a hangup message. 

However even if you choose not to send callers to a queue, with smart escalations you can always send those callers to 

1. Another team that is available 

2. An external number/call center 

3. Supervisor’s person mobile phone number 

Despite this if your calls go unanswered you can always send it to voicemail, so that your agents can listen to your customers and get back to them when they become available again. 

3. Escalation when your team is offline

   1. In case your team is offline owing to business hours, a good idea would be to configure business hours. 

   2. If you want to prepare for local outages, you can choose to route the calls to an external call center unaffected by the outage. 

Being prepared for all situations by configuring smart escalations makes you reachable by customers all the time and can give you an edge over competitors.