ConnecPath.Cloud Cell Phone and Forced Release Solution for Mobility!

I feel the need to Walk and Talk!

As a member of the Italian American community, I identify as a hand waver!  It is impossible for me to talk without moving my hands!  Actually my hands and feet.  I have to walk around and wave my hands as if the person on the other end of the phone call can see all of this excitement!   Well, actually I just have to much energy to sit around and I am constantly on the move.  This is a problem if you are a Supervisor or Agent in a call center environment.    In Amazon Connect you can set your audio end point to be something other than your WebRTC Softphone.   I often set mine to be my Cell phone so that I do not miss any calls to my personal queue in the DrVoIP/ConnecPath call center.

Use Case

There are two challenges with this however, After Call Work (ACW) and Forced Release.    In most call centers, if a call is presented to an AVAILABLE and IDLE Agent and they do not answer or accept the call, the system will mark them absent.  To assure that we do not waste the next callers time, we put that miscreant Agent in “Forced Release” and they will not get any phone calls until they manually return to the Available and Idle mode.   Now if you set your audio end point to your desk phone and you set your desk phone to be your cell this becomes a problem big time . The first call comes in, rings your Cell Phone as you had configured but then goes into ACW.   You need to change it back to AVAILABLE.    A worse case scenario is the call is sent to your cell phone but you do not take the call.  This now puts you in Forced Release with a guarantee that you can eat your lunch with no further phone call interruptions!  Not what you had in mind!

ConnecPath Solution Set

Thanks to our customers we were asked to modify the behavior of “Forced Release”.   Many Agents are put in Forced Release and did not even see the incoming call and do not know they need to set themselves to AVAILABLE again until some supervisor reminds them.   We were asked to modify this behavior to mirror ACW behavior.   You can set the timer on ACW so that at the end of the count down the Agent is returned to the AVAILABLE state, so that fixes one problem.  When I set my desk phone to be my cell phone, at the end of the call my Dextr dashboard returns me to AVAILABLE.

ConnecPath has a setting that enables you to create a “presented but not answered”   behavior.   This enables you to set a missed call to offer one of three options:   traditional Forced Release,  Mirror Wrap Up behavior and also configure a custom option.  In our Cell phone scenario, this is very helpful.  If I miss a call, I do not have to worry about having someone back at the office put me back in AVAILABLE.  Having set myself to mirror ACW and having set that timer to 10 seconds, I know that all is well!

The Custom Option enables you to create your own label, set the timer to return the agent to AVAILABLE.

Though a common practice in call centers it to use the traditional Forced Release behavior, some call center supervisors want a specific behavior.  We have many clients who have upgraded from ShoreTel ECC to Amazon Connect.  Some have upgraded from ShoreTel Workgroups, a kind of “poor man’s call center.   These folks typically want to control the forced release behavior and automatically return the Agent to an AVAILABLE status.