How to treat customer voicemail boxes with Autonomous Dialer

Introduction

When using the Autonomous Dialer to contact customers, the possibility exists where the voicemail box of a customer accepts the call. With the example below you can end the automated message with a professional/standardized/corporate message in the voicemail box of the customer before the call gets disconnected by the Autonomous Dialer.

The message played to the voicemail box of the customer will be the complete announcement configured for your Autonomous Dialer (i.e. Pre-Welcome message -> Welcome Message -> (Optionally)IVR Interactive Voice Response, or IVR, is a telephone application to take orders via telephone keypad or voice through a computer. By choosing menu options the caller receives information, without the intervention of a human operator, or will be forwarded to the appropriate Agent. questions) which can then, after a timeout, be followed by a predefined closing message.

Note: Typically a voicemail greeting of greatly varying length is played by a voicemail box before recording starts and the Autonomous dialer will also immediately start announcing its messages. So initially there might be two automated messages "talking" simultaneously and only the later part of the Autonomous Dialer message will be recorded by the voicemail box of customer. Keep this in mind when "designing" your messages.

Prerequisites

• UCC A Unified Contact Center, or UCC, is a queue of interactions (voice, email, IM, etc.) that are handled by Agents. Each UCC has its own settings, IVR menus and Agents. Agents can belong to one or several UCCs and can have multiple skills (competencies). A UCC can be visualized as a contact center “micro service”. Customers can utilize one UCC (e.g. a global helpdesk), a few UCC’s (e.g. for each department or regional office) or hundreds of UCC’s (e.g. for each bed at a hospital). They are interconnected and can all be managed from one central location. configured with Autonomous Dialer, Learn More

Configuration

1. Create the IVR you would like to offer to the customer, Learn More

2. Additional, change the Welcome Message

   1. Set action to Disconnect

   2. Set ChoiceTimeout to 5 seconds (or however long you think your customers need to select one of your IVR choices)

       Tip: Set this timeout to a higher value to allow the IVR messages to be repeated more times.

   3. Add a message to the Answer or AudioAnswer notifying that you have not received a choice and may have reached a voicemail box and will try another time.

Warning: A current anomaly in the SharePoint form of the Welcome Message does not allow the Timeout to be set when selecting Disconnect as an Action. A workaround is to temporarily select Skill as an Action, select any configured skill (this skill will not be used in this flow), then set the Timeout value, revert the Action back to Disconnect. The Timeout will now be kept. See animated GIF below:
(click to view GIF)

How to use

1. Autonomous Dialer item is scheduled.

2. Autonomous Dialer calls customer.

3. Customer doesn't accepts and the call is routed to the voicemail box of the customer.

4. The ChoiceTimeout timer reaches 5 seconds and will play the automatic (answer) message.

5. Customer voicemail box stores the (end of) automated message train until the disconnect.

   Note: There is no technical mechanism available to detect when the customers voicemail greeting starts and ends (until the "beep"), so automated announcements played during that length of time will not end up in the customers voicemail box. Typically the last audio fragment is the most important to leave with the customer.

6. Customer can listen back to the message left in their voicemail box.