What is a call robot?
There are several ways that outbound calls can be placed in LeadDesk, from making calls manually through automatic calling modes like progressive or preview (see Calling methods for more). Call robots take things further, some, like the AI Dialer, even start placing calls even before an agent is available to take it.
LeadDesk offers several different call robots (see LeadDesk dialing modes compared). They have different algorithms and approaches, but the aim is the same for all of them: to reduce the time agents spend waiting for a "live" call.
- The robot calls the contacts in the contact list, and only when the call is picked up does it pass the call to an agent.
- Agents can be more effective because they don't need to spend time waiting for calls to ring out unanswered.
Switching on robot calls
Not all LeadDesk environments use call robots, and even those that do may only use robots for some of their projects. If the project you are working on does use a call robot, you mark yourself ready to receive these calls on the Inbound tab of the Outbound interface.
In the Outbound agent interface:
- Go to the Outbound page.
- Go to the Inbound tab.
- Click the Start inbound toggle to switch inbound on.
- The robot will start sending calls to you. Robot calls will be connected to you automatically.
While inbound is switched on, you will normally not be able to go to other pages in the interface. To go to, for example, the Callbacks tab, you will need to switch off inbound first.
Contact details
As there is no way to be sure which contact will pick up a call first, you will not see the contact's details until the call is already live with you.
Agent settings
Because call robots make the calls and then offer them to agents, the robot does not follow individual agent preferences. For example, if the agent has permissions to restrict calls to a particular contact list for a project, this will affect progressive or preview calling for them, but not robot calls.
Switching off robot calls
To stop receiving robot calls:
- Click the Start inbound toggle to switch inbound off.
Robots, queues and call blending
It is important to note that call robots are not intended to be used alongside normal inbound queues, or with the call blending option.
- You will never be offered a robot call while handling a queue call, or the other way around.
- If agents are unavailable to robot calls because they are handling queue calls, this will impact the robot's ability to meet its drop rate target. Larger agent pools working with a low number of queue calls may not notice much difference, but smaller teams or busier queues can affect the robot's efficiency.
- If call blending is turned on for a project, the inbound tab is not shown and inbound queue calls can be offered to you in any tab of the Outbound interface. The Predictive and AI Dialer call robots will not make any calls while call blending is on.