Out of hours and holiday messages in call flows

Most businesses and call centers need to play announcements (babelforce calls these audios) on the phone when a call comes in on a public holiday or out of business hours. This article explains how to set this up.

Here is an extract of a call-flow that includes the most common elements to handle out-of-hours and non-service day messages and rules:

You need 3 babelforce elements for the setup: business hour / calendar definitions, Triggers and application modules:

1. Set up the Business Hours and Calendars defining the days and hours you want to use.
2. Create the Triggers and their conditions using the Business Hours and Calendar definitions.
3. Use a Switch node module with the Triggers you created in step 2 and Audio Players to play your messages.

Let's go through the 3 steps in detail:

Step 1 - Define Business Hours and Calendars

Define business hours. Go to Scheduling > Business Hours to create your opening hours. For example here is one for time zone USA New York (East coast) and Monday to Friday 9:00 to 17:00.

And here is a Calendar definition that has only specified one day off. You can add more dates by clicking "Add".

Note that you can specify precise dates and times that are shown in a certain time zone defined for the calendar.

Step 2 - Create Triggers using the Business Hours and Calendars

Every Business Hour and Calendar you specify will automatically appear as an expression you can use in the babelforce Triggers. To set up the Trigger, go to Triggers.

Here is an example of a trigger to check the Business Hours:

And this Trigger checks if a nonservice day is given (a holiday, closed day, ...):

Step 3 - Create call flow modules and use the Triggers

First, create your Audio Player module. To do this go to IVR Call flows > Call flows.

For example, here is the "Audios" tab of a simple Audio Player that plays one audio file, the "sorry we are closed" message:

Note that you upload the audio files separately under IVR Call flows > Call flows. Read more on audio files here.

Finally, you can add the Trigger and the Audio Player module to a Routing Rule in a Switch Node module. Add one Routing Rule for each case (Out of hours/Nonservice day/etc.) and route calls to the Audio Players that play out the correct announcement files.

Here is an example Switch Node leading to the appropriate Audio Player. As you can see, we only added three Routing rules. If none of these apply, the call will be led to the after flow "Welcome only - no agents enabled".

As you can see, this covers all four cases shown in the very first call flow diagram in this article:

• Non-service day: holiday, closed day, etc.
• Out of Business Hours
• Agents enabled: agents logged in for work
• Agents not enabled: agents not logged in for work

That's it. Once you have this setup, then in future all you need to do to play the right announcements is to change the business hours and calendar definitions.