We have set-up our Flex, and stuck on one of the last steps. We are a small office, and have a main number that clients call us on. If they ask for a specific employee, more importantly, if the specific employee is required to answer the client issue, and they are marked UNAVAILABLE, it doesn't appear we have access to send the call to voicemail (the transfer button is grayed out).
Is there a work around? A way to direct call the VM? Do we need to tweak our flow? If not, it appears we need to be logged in 24/7 to have access to VM's. A fairly inefficient and expensive option.
OK, I think I know what the issue is. A call comes through to one agent in Flex, but they need to transfer it to the other agent. If the other agent is also available, they can transfer the call no problem. If the other agent is not available, you would like to transfer the call to that agent's voicemail, but there's no way to do that right now.
The issue is that Flex is built around available agents and doesn't have voicemail built in. You've added voicemail as part of the Studio Flow, but this is not integrated to the Flex interface at all.
I would solve this with a Flex plugin that does a couple of things:
Add a button to the agent transfer list for unavailable agents to send to their voicemail.
That button would trigger a request to a Twilio Function, sending it the Call's Sid and the agent you want to transfer to.
The Function could then use the calls API to update the call, redirecting it to the existing voicemail handlers that you have for your agents.
I'm afraid I don't have example code for this plugin, but there is great documentation on building Flex plugins that you can follow to get up to speed.
Related
I would like to build an end-to-end test of my Twilio Studio Flow, where it receives an incoming call and from there proceeds to expect user input via dial-pad and voice. I've also connected the REST API as an additional trigger to point to the same tree as the voice path. So far I can create a new execution of said flow and have the steps returned, and from there I would like to respond to each additional step with test input (in the form of TwiML) and continue the execution to determine the pass/fail of my tests with expected input.
There is a recent blog I read that may be of interest to you.
Automating how IVR call flows are tested
https://tech.ovoenergy.com/automating-how-ivr-call-flows-are-tested/
ivr-tester
https://github.com/SketchingDev/ivr-tester
That said, is there a particular issue you encountered with the above approach you are taking? It is not clear what the issue is.
Requirement
Our business requires us to expand the functionality of the transfer feature that is already built in to
Twilio Flex.
What exists today
Today's functionality (out of the box) is partially what we need with the Actions.TransferTask functions. The issue with this is that when we choose an agent to cold transfer to, and they're not available, the call gets put back in to a queue and picked up by the next available agent. This seems completely counter intuitive to how I would expect it to work as I would expect that call to go to voicemail if the agent is unable to pick up.
What we tried
We have logged a support ticket with Twilio to no avail. Any attempts to use the StartConferenceCall won't work because we're on an active call. Twilio functions' Dial doesn't seem to work as I don't seem to have access to my current call. (Dial is meant for calls that are about to happen?) But Dial seems to be the only process that allows digits to be passed. Therefore, conferences & participants don't seem to be the answer either.
What we do have though is a phone number that will end up in our primary work flow and if the incoming number is the aforementioned number, we skip the voice prompts, accept digits and redirect to the agent. This part works.
What we need
We're looking for a Twilio function or plugin Action (or some other method that I'm unaware of) that can cold transfer a call to another agent with no over flow to a queue (let it get picked up by voicemail).
When a customer dials my Twilio number, I need Twilio to first try to call my PBX system. Currently using 3CX. If the call is not answered by a person, I need to find a way to send that call back to Twilio and go to another resource. For my purposes, that resource is Twilio AutoPilot.
Basically, if a human doesn't answer the phone, I want the robot to try and help the customer instead.
The only thing I've been able to come up with so far is to create another Twilio number and have that number be the fallback within the PBX. The problem with that solution is with Twilio, you cannot mask the number to match the CallerID of the customer calling in, and I would really like to be able to know that number. Also you are creating 2 call paths, which could make this an expensive option.
The only other solution I could think of, which would use 3 calls paths, would be to use another provider that does allow me to mask the caller id, and then send that to the Twilio number.
I am not a programmer, I have basic coding knowledge, but just barely.
Any help would be appriciated. Thanks
You can use Programmable Voice with a SIP Dial to initially contact your PBX (it will appear the same way an Elastic SIP Trunk call will appear to your PBX). The easiest way is to use the Connect Call to Widget in Studio. If that call fails, say 3CX returns a 404 - Not Found, Studio can continue to the next Widget via the Connected Call Ended path which can then perform additional steps of your choosing. The CallerID is maintained this way as well.
Elastic SIP Trunking is not designed for this particular call flow but rather a simple conduit from/to the PSTN.
Happy Path
Fallback Path
I have my application integrated with Datadog for monitoring purpose. At the same time I want the notifications/calls to be sent to the team if any of the metric fails to achieve the desires value. I used Webhooks integration in Datadog for this purpose. In the webhooks configuration I have set the URL (Twilio request) and I do get a call on my number. Now I am looking for an scenario wherein if the user doesn't pick the call for say 30secs then try calling the second number. How do I achieve this?
Just use a find me Twimlet. Enter up to 10 numbers and a timeout between moving on to the next number. Twilio will do the rest.
https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets/findme
If you are looking for a more full featured paid solution I'd recommend PagerDuty. DataDog has an integration for PagerDuty. Any monitor that gets triggered that mentions #pagerduty-myteamname(as example) in the monitor message will cause PagerDuty to page the on call person. If that person does not acknowledge the page you can configure it to go through list of people to contact next until it is acknowledged by someone.
I am using the IVR sample script found here:https://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/ivrs-call-screening-and-recordingLet's say that someone calls and connects to agent 1, if the agent reject's the call, it then hangs up the person who called (which is pointless). I want to redirect that person if the agent doesn't pick up or the agent rejects the line to a voicemail twimlet (http://twimlets.com/voicemail?Email=my%40email.com&). I know that this should be easy to do but I am having a hard time figuring out where to add the twimlet,<redirect>http://twimlets.com/voicemail?Email=my%40email.com&</redirect>
I think a good place to look for this might be in the OpenVbx project.
This is their link http://www.openvbx.org/.
In the source code, I would direct you to have a look at the Dial applet server side implementation.
a basic version of steps would be this.
When dialling an agent instead of only dialling one agent, you dial a list, group or department of agents, you can implement your own logic here. I would suggest taking a careful look at how the whisper functionality was written, basically from it you can see that an agent is required to accept the call with interaction by pressing a button, this helps if you agents devices that you are placing calls to, are perhaps mobile devices and go into voicemail. In the end, while you are dialling more than one agent, the first agent to pickup the call is the agent who will be connected to the caller. The rest of the dial attempts will be cancelled for you.
The source code for the project resides here https://github.com/twilio/OpenVBX
while the source code is in PHP, with Twilio it is luckily very easy to see how one would convert this to other languages. You could also simply get the project running and look at the Twiml that is generated when dialling for example and use that as guidance for your own solution.