This unit goes into more detail on Fastcall’s User Status feature. It covers the effects of the feature, how you can control it as both a user and an administrator, and how you may wish to use it to improve call responsiveness.
What is Availability?
Availability controls whether inbound calls are routed to a given user. If they’re ‘logged out’ or ‘busy’, the call will go straight to their voicemail or just terminate if no voicemail is set, regardless of the inbound routing behavior for that user. If the user is part of an Interactive Voice Response group then they will be skipped and the next behavior will take place.
How do users control their availability?
As covered in the Fastcall Basics module, Fastcall users control their availability via the Widget. They can also set it via Fastcall Settings > User Settings.
How can I control the availability of my users as an administrator?
Fastcall offers manual and automated controls for user availability. These are as follows:
The Users Panel
This provides an overview of the status of every user. You can click on any user in the list to access their User Settings and manually change their user status.
User Status Setting
Found under Fastcall Settings > Admin Settings > User Status.
- In User Status List you can add a new status, choose the type (available/offline) and mark as default, or edit/delete the existing ones.
- In Outbound Calls you can set user status settings for outbound calls like always become available after a call, show a notification to change status if you are not available or ignore user status.
- In Missed Calls Status you can set Fastcall to automatically log a user out if they miss a call.
User status on Call termination
Found under Fastcall Settings > Admin Settings > Logging > Call Termination, you can set the delay between a user closing a call and being changed from ‘busy’ to ‘available’.
So what?
Decide if/how you want to automate availability changes, and then train your users appropriately
Depending on how your organization works, you may have an ‘inbound call center’ setup, where customers ring into a central number and this is distributed to users via an Interactive Voice Response. The IVR will route the call to the first available user in a group – so if they’re not actually available (for example, they’re away from their desk), the caller will have a suboptimal experience as the call rings and rings and nobody picks up, despite the fact you have another user ready and waiting to take the call.
Another possible failure mode is that users do not set themselves as available when they are. This could result in callers being unable to get through at all, despite the fact your team is sitting there ready to take calls.
If you’re operating an ‘inbound call center’ its probably a good idea to set automatic log out and to have the duration on the inbound receivers set relatively short (10 seconds or so). You should be monitoring other statistics for your team (such as a number of calls taken) in order to spot users who repeatedly forget to log in, and the team leader should be able to view the admin panel to manually change the status of team members.
For organizations operating a more traditional ‘office switchboard’, the only worry is users who do not log in, as inbound callers may expect a call to ring for a few seconds and then go to voicemail if the user is away from their desk. In this situation, you may wish to turn auto-logout off so your users don’t have to worry about it.
Last updated: Fastcall v8.0.0, 2023-03-21