Voicemail detection

Retry outbound voice surveys or leave messages when customer voicemail is detected.

Voicemail detection in Feedback provides greater control over call outcomes through better handling of voicemail responses and retry logic.

When voicemail detection is enabled for a survey, you can specify how many times Feedback should retry the call and how long to wait before each attempt. You can also upload a custom audio file to be played when voicemail is detected, allowing for greater control over messaging in this scenario.

Voicemail detection and retry behavior are fully configurable at the survey level, with reporting and logging available for troubleshooting.

Note:
  • Voicemail detection settings must be enabled by a Mindful Feedback super admin (Mindful staff) for your organization prior to use.

  • After being enabled for your organization, voicemail detection will not be turned on automatically for your surveys. You will need to enable the feature on each relevant survey.

  • You can tune voicemail detection behavior using optional parameters defined in Twilio's API. These parameters must be configured at the phone connection level.

Configure voicemail detection

Follow the steps below to enable voicemail detection for a survey:
  1. On the survey configuration page, open the Voice & SMS tab.
    image of the voice and SMS tab
  2. Make sure that a phone connection is selected in the Outbound connection field.

    Contact a Mindful representative for help if no phone connections are available.

  3. Enable the Machine detection toggle switch.
  4. Configure each of the fields below the toggle switch:
    example fields
    • Machine Detection Prompt — Select a sound file to be played when voicemail is detected. You might use this opportunity to thank customers for their recent interactions and inform them that you will call again with a survey.

      To learn how to upload custom audio files to make them available in the dropdown menu, see Sound files.

    • Machine Detection Timeout — Enter the number of seconds that Twilio should attempt to detect an answering machine before timing out.

    • Machine Detection Speech Threshold — Enter the minimum speech duration, in milliseconds, used to distinguish between a person and an answering machine.

      Speech shorter than this value may be treated as a person. Speech longer than this value may be treated as a machine.

    • Machine Detection Speech End Threshold — Enter the length of silence, in milliseconds, required after speech to consider the speech complete.

    • Machine Detection Silence Timeout — Enter the number of milliseconds of initial silence after which an unknown AnsweredBy result will be returned.

    • Machine Detection Retries — Enter the number of times to retry the survey call after detecting voicemail.

    Note: For more information on the parameters affected by these settings, see Twilio's Answering Machine Detection guide.
  5. Click Update to save the changes when finished.
With this configuration in place, voicemail detection is now active for the survey. Repeat this process for all surveys that should use voicemail detection.

Impact on interaction details

Voicemail detection has several impacts on Interaction Details for survey interactions:

  • Interactions that reach the retry limit due to voicemail detection will be considered abandoned and treated as other abandoned interactions in dashboards, reports, and triggers.

  • The Events section of the Interaction Details will show "Answering Machine Reached".

example interaction details