Contact Center

Manage customer reconnection in Mindful's Contact Center settings, covering callbacks, choose-hold calls, and connection failures.

The Contact Center section allows you to control how Mindful reconnects the customer with your call center in three scenarios: callbacks, choose-hold calls, and failures to connect to the call center. This article discusses everything you can configure in the Contact Center section.

Quick Access: Callback > Call Targets > Your Call Target > General tab > Contact Center

image of the contact center settings

Telephony Type and Number

There are four distinct Telephony Type and Number settings in the Contact Center section, which come into play in different scenarios:

  • Callback for normal callbacks being delivered to the call center
  • Callback Failover for emergency situations in which the Callback Number is unreachable
  • Choose Hold for callers who decline a callback offer
  • Choose Hold Failover for situations in which the Choose Hold Number is unreachable

The Telephony Type setting determines whether the system will deliver callbacks over the Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) or use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) sessions in each scenario. Some features, such as User Data Sets, require SIP for the Telephony Type.

Note:

For Government Users - SIP is the only Telephony Type supported in the Government instance.

The Number represents the SIP address or PSTN number that the system will dial to connect the customer to the corresponding high-priority queue in the call center after receiving a callback.

Note: The Callback Number field is required, and must contain a value before a new Call Target can be saved.

When is the Callback Number Dialed?

Mindful will dial the Callback Number at a specific point in the call flow, based on the First Party Called setting. Consult the following examples for more details.

Examples

First Party Called = Customer First

For Customer First interactions, the Callback Number is dialed after the customer confirms they are available to speak with an agent. The system will not dial the number if the customer is not ready to wait in the high-priority holding queue.

illustration of customer first dialing

First Party Called = Agent First

For Agent First interactions, the Callback Number is dialed as soon as a callback is ready to launch. The system will attempt to connect with an agent and confirm they are available before dialing the customer.

illustration of agent first dialing

Use Custom Callback (or Choose Hold) Failover Number

The Custom Callback Failover feature allows you to specify an alternate contact center phone number or SIP address for the system to use if the Callback Number or Choose Hold Number accumulate 20 failed dials. The number of failed dials that can occur before triggering a failover cannot be modified. Like the other numbers in the Contact Center section, you can configure a Telephony Type and unique number for the failover:

  • Callback Failover Telephony Type: Select PSTN if you would like the system to dial the failover number via the public telephone network. Select SIP if you would like to use VoIP sessions.
  • Callback Failover Number: Enter the alternate call center phone number if you have selected PSTN on the Custom Failover Method toggle switch, or enter a SIP address if you have selected SIP.

Clear Call Center Failover Count

The Clear Call Center Failover Count button will display the number of failures accumulated since the last time the count was cleared, as shown here:

When the button shows accumulated failures, you can click it to reset the failure count for the associated phone number back to zero.

Important:
  • The failover will occur when 20 failures have accumulated. The failure count does not reset automatically. Be sure to check this value regularly for your Call Targets and clear the count manually when needed.
  • The failover count applies to the Callback Number, not the Call Target! This means that any Call Targets that share the same Callback Number will also share a failure count. A failure of an outbound dial for one Call Target will increment the failure count for all Call Targets using the same number.

If your integration uses SIP for the Callback Number, we recommend using a PSTN number for the Custom Callback Failover Number. This will bypass any potential issues with SIP communication that may be causing failures to dial the primary number. This can be especially helpful if you do not have an up-front SIP/PSTN failover built into your telephony environment already.

We recommend using the Choose Hold Phone Number to send callers who chose to hold to a different destination than callbacks. The chose-hold destination should queue calls at normal priority while the callback destination queues calls at high priority. Using different destinations provides benefits for reporting and routing, as well.