Every call center admin or agent dreads accumulating missed calls and overflowing wait queues. You can easily manage such scenarios through Freshcaller's Smart Escalations.
What are smart escalations?
Smart escalations are a sequence of configurations based on a set of conditions and rules in Freshcaller. They let you route calls to another active avenue (voicemail or a different team, for instance) when agents are unable to attend them.
Who can configure smart escalations?
An Account Admin or an Admin can set up this feature.
How to configure smart escalations?
To configure smart escalations,
You need to start with setting up a call queue in the Admin console of your Freshcaller account.
Once you’re done configuring the basic call queue, you can configure the call queue to smartly escalate the call when faced with the following scenarios,
When agent(s) are online, but not answering the calls
When agent(s) are busy, and not answering the calls
And, the wait queue is full
Or, when the caller has waited for a long time in queue
When agent(s) are offline
a. Agent(s) are online, but not answering the calls
In this scenario you can choose to send the caller to voicemail, direct them to another call queue or simply choose to hang up.
Ex. Let’s say you want to send them to voicemail. Choose the voicemail option from the drop-down and then choose the message to be played to the caller at that instance.
This will come in handy just in case an agent forgets to change their status to
offline when they are not around to pick calls.
b. Agent(s) are busy(online), and not answering the calls
Sometimes all your agents might be busy on other calls. That’s when you can choose any of these three actions from the dropdown present right below ‘Place caller in queue’:
1) Escalate the call to another call queue
2) Send it to voicemail, or
3) Hang up
If you do not want to perform any of these three actions , you can also place your callers on wait. In this scenario,
You can choose to place the callers in a wait queue by enabling the toggle.
You can also set the maximum number of callers that you want to place on queue.
Add an appropriate message to inform the callers that they are placed on a wait queue using the ‘Play wait message for caller’ dropdown.
What happens to a caller in a wait queue?
You can configure what happens when a caller is on a wait queue, and these are the possible scenarios:
i) The queue is full
There may be cases when your wait queue has reached the maximum limit that you’ve set. In this case,
You can direct the caller to another call queue, voicemail or hang up.
Additionally, you can also choose the message that needs to be played while the caller waits on queue.
This will give your callers context on what exactly the scenario at your end is. This might help you look like a brand who cares about your customer’s time and lets them know upfront that you are doing all you can to get an agent to answer their call.
ii) The caller has waited for a long time in queue
You can play a custom message informing the caller, their current position in the wait queue by enabling the ‘Append queue position to wait message’ toggle.
You can also set a threshold time for a caller to be on wait, post which you can allow them to leave a voicemail on pressing the ‘*’ button.
c. Agent(s) are offline
If a team of agents is not online to pick the call, you can choose to send the call to voicemail which agents can respond to when they are active later. Or, send it to another helpline number with active agents who can attend the call, or hang up after playing the Hangup message.
This way you can avoid missed calls or pacify annoyed callers by assuring them a response.
