Phone Calls

Your agents take and make phone calls in the browser, inside the help desk. No phone or extra app is needed: a headset and the dashboard are enough.

Calls reach your team when a number is answered by your team, or when the voice AI transfers a call to your_team.

Before you take calls

• Keep the dashboard open. Calls ring in the browser tab. Leaving or reloading the page during a call ends it.
• Allow the microphone. The browser asks for it when the dashboard loads. If it's blocked, you see "Microphone permission is required to make or receive calls"; allow the microphone for the dashboard in your browser's site settings.
• Be available. Calls go to agents who can take conversations: switched to Available in the menu under your avatar, within working hours if your organization uses them, and not on another call.

If your organization uses its own Twilio account, browser calling has to be set up on that account first. Contact your account manager.

Incoming calls

A call is assigned like any other conversation, by your assignment rules (the channel is Phone Call) and your agents' availability. Then the assigned agent's browser rings: a card appears at the top of the screen, "Inbound call from" the caller's name or number, with Answer and Decline.

• Answer connects you. When the call ends, its conversation opens.
• Decline, or not answering for about 30 seconds, passes the call to the next available agent.
• Agents are tried one at a time. When nobody is left, the caller gets the line's voicemail greeting, or a message that they'll be called back. See When your team answers.

A call the voice AI transferred stays in the same conversation, so the AI's part of the call and yours end up together.

During a call

The call card has mute, hold and hang up. On hold, the caller hears music and you don't hear them. You can take one call at a time.

After a call

• The recording appears in the conversation, with play and download. A conversation with several calls plays them in order.
• The transcript is added to the conversation as messages from you and the customer. A "Call completed. Waiting for transcription" event shows until it's ready.
• The conversation is closed once the recording and transcript are in, by default. Voicemails stay open.

Recordings are deleted when a conversation is scrubbed. To fetch recordings from your own systems, see conversation recordings in the REST API.

Calling a customer

• From a phone call conversation: click the phone icon, Call customer, in the conversation's top bar. Calling back a missed call continues the same conversation.
• A new call: start a new conversation, choose Phone Call, enter the number under To and click Call.

The customer sees one of the business's numbers:

1. In a conversation that already had a call, the business number from that call.
2. Otherwise the business's purchased number, if it has one.
3. Otherwise another of its numbers on the Twilio account that browser calling uses: your organization's default account, or Octocom's.
4. Otherwise the US demo number +1 659-250-4864.

A business with no phone line at all can't place calls.

If the customer is busy or doesn't answer, you see it right away, and the conversation gets an "Outbound call not connected" event.

Calls don't ring

When no agent can take the call, the caller hears the voicemail greeting if the line has one. Otherwise the call ends, with "There are no available agents at this time" if an agent had declined or missed it. Check that agents:

• have the dashboard open in a browser, with the microphone allowed,
• are switched to Available and within working hours, if your organization uses them,
• aren't already on a call,
• match your assignment rules for the Phone Call channel. A rule that assigns to one person rings only that person.

If your organization uses its own Twilio account, browser calling has to be set up on it; contact your account manager.