Call Center Administrator Guide

This guide walks you through what makes up an inbound call center in Cloud Voice and lays out the sequence of tasks for standing one up and tuning it to fit your operation.

Who this guide is for

The instructions here are written for system administrators who are responsible for building, configuring, and maintaining an inbound call center.

What an inbound call center is made of

A Cloud Voice inbound call center is built from two parts that work together:

• The call queue: configured by an administrator from the PBX (Private Branch Exchange, the phone system that routes your calls) web portal.
• The Call Center Console: a workspace built into the Cloud Voice App (web and desktop).

Call queue

The call queue is where every inbound interaction begins. Think of it as a virtual waiting room: callers hold in line until an agent is free to take them. Once a caller lands in the queue, they hear hold music and any announcements you have set while the system routes the call to whichever agents are available.

The terms below cover the building blocks of a queue and what each one does:

Term	What it means
Caller	A customer who dials into the queue.
Agents	The members who answer queue calls, extensions, or users who sign in as agents. A static agent is a permanent member of the queue and cannot log out. A dynamic agent can log in and out of the queue whenever they choose.
Announcement	Messages played to callers and agents, including the agent ID announcement, position announcement, and periodic announcement.
Music on Hold (MoH)	Music or promotional audio played to callers while they wait in the queue.
Ring strategy	The rule that determines how calls are handed out to agents.
Failover destination	Where a call is sent when it can no longer stay in the queue: when the number of waiting callers hits the Maximum Callers In Queue limit, when a caller’s wait reaches the Maximum Waiting Time, or when no agents are staffing the queue and the caller is removed from it.

Caution

Set a failover destination on every queue. If you leave it empty, callers who hit the Maximum Callers In Queue limit, wait past the Maximum Waiting Time, or arrive when no agents are logged in have nowhere to go and the call can be dropped. Point failover at something a caller can use, such as voicemail, another queue, or a reception extension.

For the full list of queue settings, see Queue Preferences.

Call Center Console

The Call Center Console gives supervisors (queue managers) and agents a single place to work queue calls. It runs inside the Cloud Voice App on web and desktop, and includes a configurable Wallboard that surfaces 16 key performance metrics for at-a-glance tracking, along with a switchboard-style Queue Panel for monitoring and steering queue activity in real time.

To learn how supervisors and agents monitor performance and handle calls in the console, see the Cloud Voice Call Center Supervisor Guide and the Cloud Voice Call Center Agent Guide.

How to build an inbound call center

Work through the following stages to take a call center from an empty queue to a fully instrumented operation.

Note

The Call Center features in stages 3 and 4 (queue managers, queue notifications, SLA, Console permissions, and Call Center reports) become available only after the call center service is activated on the PBX. Confirm it is active before you plan those steps.

1. Create a call queue

Lay out the basic queue, create it, and choose how inbound calls are distributed among your agents.

• For a queue that distributes calls by workload, see Create a Call Queue.
• For a queue that distributes calls by agent skill, see Set up Skill-based Routing for a Queue.

Tip

Pick the routing style that matches your goal. Workload-based routing spreads calls evenly so no single agent is overloaded. Skill-based routing sends each caller to the most qualified agent first, which suits teams where agents specialize (for example, billing versus technical support).

2. Strengthen queue management

Layer on advanced queue features to improve the caller experience, and add agent-management settings that raise productivity.

• Queue Callback

  Let callers keep their place in line without staying on the phone. Enable callback for the queue and decide whether callers request it by pressing a digit or by waiting until a timeout. See Allow Users to Request a Callback in a Queue.

  Tip

  Turning on callback lowers the number of abandoned calls: callers hang up and get called back when an agent frees up instead of giving up while on hold, which protects your queue performance numbers.

• Queue Priority

  Cut down on hold time by weighting your queues. Assign each queue an initial weight and an acceleration weight so the system can decide which queue outranks another and move calls in the higher-priority queue up the line. When an agent is signed in to several queues, calls from the queue with the greater weight reach that agent first. See Set a Priority for a Call Queue.

• Queue Agent Management

  Fine-tune how agents and supervisors handle day-to-day status and activity so agents can work more efficiently and deliver better service:

  • Agent pause reasons: Define specific reasons an agent can attach when they pause their service. Tracking these reasons helps you and your supervisors understand agent availability, spot service disruptions, and plan staffing more accurately. See Set Pause Reasons for Queue Agents and Monitor Specific Pause Status of an Agent by Function Key.
  • Queue call log access: Give some or all agents access to the queue call log so they can follow up on customer conversations. See Allow Agents to View Queue Call Logs on Cloud Voice App.
  • Agent status management: Let agents change their own status on the fly using a feature code or an IP phone for a more flexible operation. See Allow Agents to Manage Their Status by Dialing a Feature Code and Allow Agents to Manage Their Status via IP Phones.

  Note

  A feature code is a short dialed code (for example, a string beginning with *) that triggers a PBX function from any phone. Agents dial it to switch their own status without opening an app. On IP phones, the same actions can be mapped to BLF (Busy Lamp Field) keys, programmable buttons whose lamp shows the current status at a glance.

3. Set up the Call Center

Prepare the workspaces that give agents and supervisors everything they need in one interface.

• Assign queue managers (supervisors): Name one or more extension users as managers of the queue. A queue manager does not have to be an agent in that queue. Managers can open the Call Center Console dashboards to monitor and manage the queue and can receive queue notifications by email. See Set up Queue Managers.
• Configure queue notifications: Choose which events send an email to your queue managers, for example a missed or abandoned call, the service level agreement crossing its alarm threshold, or a callback request being made or failing. See Customize Queue Notification.
• Set a Service Level Agreement (SLA): Define a target service level and an SLA threshold so managers can judge whether agents are answering customers quickly enough for quality assurance. See Set up Service Level Agreement (SLA).
• Grant Call Center Console permissions: Control who can open the Wallboard and Queue Panel, and set what queue managers and agents are each allowed to do on the Queue Panel. See Grant Call Center Console Permissions.

4. Work with Call Center reports

Open the set of predefined queue- and agent-based reports to run focused analysis of how your call center is performing. See Call Center Reports Overview.