In this section of the tutorial, we are going to look at agents and the babelConnect app. Both topics are very easy and straightforward but it is essential to understand how agents and babelConnect interact as your team won't be able to take calls if you are not 100% sure about it.

Agents

"Agents" are the babelforce users. To take calls, each of your team members must have an agent login. Go to Routing & Queuing > Agents to find a list view of all agents you already set up.

In this section, you can add so-called "Internal Agents" by clicking "Add" (see screenshot below). You can see in the Source column the word 'internal' - this means that these accounts are not synchronized from any CRM or helpdesk integration. Don't worry about the details, yet, we will explain more in the next chapter. For now, setting up "Internal Agents" is all you need to know. 

In the screenshot below, you see an Internal Agent called "My Test Agent" with an assigned number.

⇒ What you should know about the Agents section?

• Any Agent you create is automatically added to the group _all (this is the babelforce default group every agent has to be part of).
• They will always have the Line-Status "available". This means the Agent can, in theory, be called as long as the presence state is also "Available".
• However, in our example, the Presence is put on "Busy"  - so right now, the Agent will not receive any incoming calls. You can adjust the availability by clicking on the down-pointing arrow (any new agent will have the Presence "Busy" by default).
• The last two icons show a pencil - this allows you to edit the account - and a trash can - here you can delete the agent.

✸ Good to know: You can click on the name and the number and edit the Agent within the list overview (so no need to go into the edit mode for these changes).

Adding internal agents 

• Click on the "Add" button in the upper right corner
• Add your employee's name
• Add a phone number the agent should receive the calls on (the number needs to be unique)
• Add the employee's email address (the email needs to be unique)
• The employee will receive an email to confirm the address
• After the account is confirmed, another email will ask the employee to set a password 

 

If you prefer to follow video instructions, check it here:

babelConnect

In the last step to set up the Agent user in babelforce, your employee had to set a password. This password is the login for the babelConnect app. But what is babelConnect and why do you need it?

babelConnect is the agent-integration with the babelforce system. But it is not a phone - you will always need some kind of softphone or hard phone to accept incoming calls. You can imagine babelConnect app as a gateway for the agent to the babelforce platform. It allows agents to set their status from "busy" to "available", they see who is calling from which queue, start and end recordings, control their after-call time, they can send SMS and initiate calls to customers. 

babelConnect is a great and easy tool for your agents to control their availability and process flows. You don't necessarily have to use it (if management wants to control their agent's availability via the manager app this is of course possible) but we highly recommend it.

Find out more about babelConnect in this article. It explains every field and it's very useful if you want to train your agents.

The next section will introduce call queues. It's the last step before we can move on to the first most basic call flow.