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).
Related
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.
We are working on a requirement where we are initiating a call from Twilio client SDK [Javascript]. We have an ASP.Net MVC Core application handling incoming Webhook request from Twilio Twiml app. To initiate a call from a client side, we are using Twiml dial verb and providing from and to number. Further our requirement is to send a voice message as soon as an answering machine is detected.
As we have used Dial verb of Twiml, we can't pass detect answering machine and hence can't send voice message. This is by design of Dial verb as it is an attended calling mechanism. After going through a documentation, I have found that, REST API allows to detect and answering machine and also allows sending a voice message. Twilio REST API shall be used for an unattended call initiation and rule based workflow. Twiml Dial verb uses VoiceResponse class to initiate a call whereas Twilio REST API uses CallResource to initiate a call.
I wanted to confirm my understanding before I start working on possible alternatives.
We are thinking of implementing above use case with below steps
Make a Twilio REST API call to initiate an unattnded phone call with answering machine detection option enabled.
If API responds with answered_by value as human or unknown then we will invoke a webhook that shall patch the call using Twiml Dial verb.
If API responds with answered_by value as machine then it shall use a Twiml which contains a voice message that can be sent to callee.
The above is correct. Is there a specific question, however?
Twilio’s Answering Machine Detection Now Generally Available
https://www.twilio.com/blog/answering-machine-detection-generally-available
We have developed an outbound call mechanism using TwiML app and Dial verb using Javascript SDK & ASP.Net Core MVC with Twilio SDK. We came across an issue where we found that answering machine detection and voice message drop is not supported by Dial verb. We are taking a different approach where we will use Twilio REST API to initiate a call. It has a provision to detect an answering machine and respond to an outcome of answering machine detection such as patching an agent or sending a voice message. Further, There are 2 possible configurations and workflows.
MachineDetection:Enable
Possible values for answered_by are machine_start, human, fax or unknown.
1.1 If value is machine_start then we can't send a voice message as it is not waiting for "beep" after which a voice message can be send.
1.2 If value is human then we can invoke a webhook for patching a user into current call.
1.3 If value is fax then we shall not take any action [Out of scope]
1.4 If value is unknown then we may patch a user to take action. This can be a deciding factor for making user productive. More number of requests ending in Unknown shall degrade the desired outcome.
MachineDetection:DetectMessageEnd
Possible values for answered_by are machine_end_beep, machine_end_silence, machine_end_other, human, fax or unknown.
2.1 If value is machine_end_beep then we can use a TwiML url to send a voice message to a callee.
2.2 If value is machine_end_silence then we can use TwiML url to send a voice message to a callee. Such scenarios needs to be handled with this default action and improved over period of time.
2.3 If value is machine_end_other then we can use TwiML url to send a voice message to a callee. Such scenarios needs to be handled with this default action and improved over period of time.
2.4 If value is human then we can invoke a webhook for patching a user into current call.
2.5 If value is fax then we shall not take any action [Out of scope]
2.6 If value is unknown then we may patch a user to take action. This can be a deciding factor for making user productive. More number of requests ending in Unknown shall degrade the desired outcome.
Rerference:
https://www.twilio.com/docs/voice/answering-machine-detection
https://www.twilio.com/docs/voice/answering-machine-detection#webhook-parameters
Based on above workflows we are deciding to use MachineDetection:DetectMessageEnd configuration option. We do have a query regarding point number 2.4. Below is a scenario,
We have made an API request to initiate a call with MachineDetection:DetectMessageEnd configuration. A callee has picked a phone and introduced himself/herself. Twilio has detected a human and set answered_by to human. This has triggered a webhood which as patched a user to current call. It is very much possible that a user who has joined the conference is not aware of who is at other end and can end up asking who is this? This may anoy a callee and affecting overall customer engagement.
This is the scenario shared by our client based on his experience.
I would like to know how fast Twilio can detect "answerd_by"?
Is there a mechanism that can allow a recording of a callee to be played after patching a call so that a user is aware of who is at another end. Is it something Twilio can provide or we need to use the recording feature to do so?
I understand that Twilio has various options to tweak AMD parameters through a Web API however, we may not have enough data to tweak them before the start of the project. We might get there after rolling this feature in production.
Also our client mentioned that sometimes, a voice message is not delivered completely?
Is this something observed by Twilio customers too?
If so what are the best practices to ensure this shouldn't happen?
I have implemented warm transfer in the my application (C#) but I have to extend it.
Below is my new use case:
Customer calls to our Twilio number. That Twilio number is assigned to a department in our database. Based on that number I retrieve all agents in that department. So, I want this call to go to all the agents in that department and all agents can see an incoming call on their screen.
How can I make a call to multiple agents on their 'client id' (they have generated their capability token with)?
PS: I can't use dial because dial is used for conference once agent picks up the call, I have to do something in CallResource.Create() function in C#
Twilio developer evangelist here.
If you can't do this via <Dial>, you need to loop through all the numbers you want to call within your C# code, calling CallResource.Create() for each of them.
Note, you will likely want to setup to receive statusCallback webhooks so that you can complete the other calls if someone has answered.
I'd love some advice on my twilio setup for a problem I'm trying to solve.
Overview
A client can call our twilio number and have one of three cases to handle:
- is our client and has a question - should be transfered to CC queue (2ppl),
- wants to buy our services - should be transfered to Sales queue (7ppl),
- has some other case - should be transfered to a different queue, lets call it Other (1 person)
Current solution
The client calls:
welcome message
we gather his digit input
enqueue a call to the appropiate queue
assign a task to an available worker with the conference instruction
Problem with the current solution
If there are no workers in the office to handle the call the client will wait forever until he hangs-up by himself. The wroker who answers doesn't know the clients phone number so he isn't able to fallow-up if neccesary.
Questions
After the client picks a queue i would like to check if I have any workers in the office in that queque (not in Offline mode). If everybody is on offline mode redirect to voicemail and a an email is sent to a specified email address with the caller phone number and voicemail recording url.
After the worker picks-up (accepts the reservation) send him a message with the clients phone number.
If no worker answers within a specified amount of time (for example 5 minutes) the call gets redirected to voicemail and a an email is sent to a specified email address with the caller phone number and voicemail recording url.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
Answers in order, parts 1 and 3 need to talk about voicemail which I'll cover at the bottom:
You can use a skip_if expression to skip a queue if there are no available workers.
I assume this is using the reservation.conference instruction in the JavaScript SDK. You can actually inspect the reservation object at this stage too, check out reservation.task.attributes for all the task attributes, which should include the call attributes. You can use this to show your agent on screen or send them a message some other way.
For this, you should set a timeout on your queue. When the timeout fires the task should drop through to the next queue in the workflow.
Voicemail
For parts 1 and 3 we are ejecting a task from one queue, but it needs to go somewhere else to be dealt with. You want to send the calls to voicemail, which doesn't require an agent to deal with it. Currently, the best way to deal with this is direct the task to a queue that has one bot worker in it. The job of the worker is to redirect incoming reservations straight to some TwiML. You achieve this by instantly responding to an assignment callback with the redirect instruction.
To create voicemail, you can combine <Say> and <Record>. Make sure you set the recordingStatusCallback attribute to a URL in your application, you can then use the results to email the link to the voicemail recording.
Let me know if this helps at all.
thank you for yout time to answer my questions. Below please find my reply:
1. It seems that this does not work in console - I find this information in the documentation "skip_if cannot be configured through the console - it must be posted on the workflow API". As I am not using the workflow API this is probably not a solution for me.
2. I using this tutorial: https://www.twilio.com/docs/quickstart/php/taskrouter/twiml-dequeue-call but instead of using dequeue instruction i use conference. I don't quit get how to "inspect the reservation" - maybe you have a tutorial on that? While looking for other solutions I came up with workspace event calback, but I am not sure if this would work.
3) How can I do that in the console?
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.