Adding waiting audios when customers are queued

When you call a hotline, you are usually routed to a wait music while you are waiting to be connected to the next available agent. Sometimes, the music is interrupted by a recording explaining you other service options. Usually, after a certain time, the waiting loop ends and you might be asked to call back later, leave a message or request a callback.

In this article we explain to you how to achieve all this in babelforce. Let's look at a common simple queuing experience first:

In this example, waiting music is played for some time. Then, the caller is told to wait some more before the waiting music is played again. Also, the example includes a condition for leaving the queue and ending the waiting experience once the system detects that the wait time is greater than 180 seconds at the start of a new waiting music loop.

To achieve this, you simply add an Audio Player call module. Let's call it "Looped waiting audio" and set it up like this:

• Open the Audio Player
• add some uploaded promt, Text to Speech, or refer to a URL and save the call module
• Open it again
• In the after flow, you can now refer the call module to itself (we want to create a loop)

3. Add a Post-action using a Trigger to evaluate the queue wait time and carry out the Action "Leave queue" once the wait time is too long (in our case 180 seconds). The expression you should use is nested under Queue Data:  Call wait time (or {queue.waitTime})

Now you can use this "Looped waiting audio" within the module in your "Automatic Call Distribution" that controls distribution of the calls to the agents via a queue. As you can see in the screenshot below, we selected our freshly created Audio Player as our "Wait Line Experience":

Important note:

You have probably noticed that you could basically build any IVR flow and use it as a wait line experience. That's true indeed. However, please note a few things:

• Always remember to set a queue leave - otherwise your caller will remain in the queue forever
  • Set an After Flow to your ACD which will be played when the caller leaves the queue
• You can add any kind of queue experience, including switches and Input Readers, however, restrain from using the following modules
  
  • Another ACD
  • Voice recordings