Create and update voice messages in Kustomer.com

Apart from conversations, babelforce also offers to create and update voice messages in Kustomer.com. The Kustomer platform handles voice calls like any other message on the platform: Voice calls are added to a conversation on a customer’s timeline with the channel attribute set to "voice" and with a phone icon to identify the conversation as a voice call:
For more information, please visit the Kustomer.com help center.

Similar to the conversation actions in Kustomer.com, the most common use case for voice messages is to open a new message whenever a call comes in and update the message with further caller details once the call is bridged. You can update the message with the action "update voice message". However, it is also possible to update a message with attributes of the "update conversation" action. This article will guide you through both of these possibilities.

Create a voice message
Update a voice message either with the action "update voice message" or "update conversation"

To use these actions, we need to build automations. Therefore, go to Integrated processes > Global automations and click on Add to add a new one.

Once added, the automations could look like this:

Let's look at the action "Create voice message" first.

To create a new voice message on every incoming call, we choose the event "Call created" and the action "Create voice message" out of the bucket of Kustomer.com actions. In our example, we choose the trigger "always".

Now, let's look at the bottom of the automation:

Integration: Choose your Kustomer.com integration
Customer ID is prefilled by babelforce: Firstly, babelforce looks up the calling end-user in Kustomer.com. Then babelforce stores the ID of that customer as the customer ID (the placeholder you see in the screenshot will automatically be replaced by the ID). For more info about the end-user lookup, head to this article.
Similar to the Customer ID, the Conversation ID is prefilled as well: once the caller has been looked up, babelforce adds a new conversation to that customer's timeline and stores the ID of that conversation.
If you want to associate the conversation to a resource or Kustomer KObject you can enter its ID in the field Related.
Choose a subject and the direction of the message.
Also, choose a status:
- wip: work in progress - this call is ongoing
- ended: the call has ended (use this status on event call finished)
Queue ID: Kustomer offers a custom queue setup. You can build a queue in Kustomer.com and assign agents to that queue. If you want to use a custom queue, add its ID here. If you leave it empty, babelforce assigns the message to the default babelforce queue.
Placed at, Answered at & Ended at: Use these fields to set timestamps on the call events "call created", "call bridged", and "call ended". Note that Kustomer.com will automatically calculate the duration of a call if you prefill Placed at & Ended at for instance. We will have a closer look at this towards the end of this article.
Similar to conversation actions, you can also use custom attributes for message actions. Have a look at this article to get to know more about custom attributes.

Once this message is created, you can now update it either with a "voice message update" action, or an "update conversation" action.

Let's look at the "voice message update" action first:

We want to update the message on bridged, so we need to use the event "Call bridged" and the action "Update voice message". Again, we use the trigger "always".

The bottom part of the action does not look very different from the action "create voice message".

Again, we choose integration and leave the ID prefilled (in this case it's the message ID that is automatically connected to the conversation ID in Kustomer.com)
The only thing we update in our example is the variable Answered at - since this automation happens on call bridged, we can set the current timestamp.

If we want to add some more information on call bridged, we can use the action "update conversation for that. Therefore, we prefill the automation parameters as shown below:

At the bottom we can edit all information we're already familiar with regarding the action "update conversation", e.g.

Update the Name of the conversation (note, that this will overwrite the current message subject)
Assign the user that took the call
Add, remove and overwrite tags
Add an internal note to the conversation

If you want to dive into the details, please see our article on Kustomer.com conversations.

The automation could look like this:

On 'call finished' we can then update the message again to

set a timestamp once the call has been finished and to
set the status to "ended"

Note that we need to use the trigger "Call is inbound" - otherwise, this message fires on both call legs (the agent's and the customer's).

The message will now look like this in Kustomer.com: