Receiving calls and messages

Setting yourself ready

When you log in to your agent account, you will not immediately start receiving calls and messages. To set yourself ready, you must start inbound. On the Inbound page:

Receiving calls

When a call arrives to a queue, it will be offered to an available agent. Each agent can only deal with one call at a time.

When a call is offered to you, the call notification appears in the bottom left of the Omni interface.

• Click Answer to pick up the call. The call dialog will open, showing the contact's history and contact details. Although this dialog fills most of the screen, it can be minimised to access other sections of Omni if needed.
• Click Reject to decline the call. It will be offered to the next available agent instead.
• If you do not click either button, after a short period, the call will automatically be rejected for you. In this case, LeadDesk assumes you are not at your desk and will automatically switch off Inbound, so no further calls or messages will be offered until you start inbound again.

Receiving messages

When a message arrives, it will be offered to an agent, appearing in their Active list. You can be offered new messages while you are already dealing with others, limited by any capacity rules your Admin has set up.

Note that the message will only appear on one agent's Active list at a time. The Active list does not act as a group inbox, where agents can manually pick which emails to answer. Instead it shows each agent the messages they are working on, plus whichever message they are currently being offered.

Clients wanting an approach more like a group inbox might consider enabling agents to pick messages from the queue directly. See Picking emails from the queue.

Active list

The entry in the Active list will show you:

• The name of the contact (if known).
• The subject line of an email, or the start of the text if an SMS.
• The name of the project for this contact.
• A blue dot for unread messages. (Once a message has been accepted you will also see a number in brackets showing the number of unread messages).
• An icon showing the type of message received.

In this case the agent is dealing with an SMS from Rob Edwards when they are offered an email from Alice Davenport. 

• Click Accept to pick up the message to deal with it.
• If you click Reject it will be offered to the next available agent. If all available agents reject the message it may be offered to you again.
• If you do not click either button, after a short pause, the message will be treated as though you rejected it. Unlike with calls, this does not stop your Inbound. 

Message interface

When you are offered a message, if you click Accept, the Contact details appear to the right of the interface. The middle section of the interface shows:

• A banner showing the contact's name (if known), and the project associated with this conversation.
• The banner shows if there is an existing callback for this contact.
• Buttons to Transfer the conversation to another agent or queue, and the Close button that allows you to select an outcome.

Below the banner:

• In the message area, you can select tabs for Call, Email, SMS, Add Callback and Note.

By default, the selected tab will match the incoming message, in the above screenshot, the agent is dealing with an SMS, so the SMS tab is selected. If appropriate, you can switch to a different channel to continue the conversation with the contact. If you need to send the contact an image and have their email address in the contact details, you can suggest continuing the conversation by email.

• Most of the middle section of the interface is dedicated to the contact's conversation History.
• The history can be filtered to Show only unfinished activities or to Show only unread messages.

Receiving webchat messages 

While most of the interface for webchats is the same as for other message types, there are several differences worth noting.

• Webchat conversations generally will be from an Unknown contact. You can click Create contact in the Contact details to create a new contact or the magnifying glass icon to search for and merge with an existing one.
• The webchat conversation history appears in a Webchat tab, not the normal History one. You can click between History and Webchat if needed.
• In the Webchat tab, the newest messages appear at the bottom of the page. 
• If the webchat was started after the customer has used the chatbot, the full history of that conversation will be available. This can result in the webchat being offered to you with many unread messages.
• Although the normal message area appears above the history of the webchat, you reply to webchats at the bottom of the page.
• Webchat messages can include emojis.