The Contact supports routing calls to external destinations, such as external contact centres, for example, if queues overflow or if out-of-hours routing is required to provide 24/7 customer service.
The external destination might be, for example, an AI-based virtual agent used to handle some of the simpler job responsibilities of live agents, such as answering customer questions on accounts, helping with a password, or providing information on a company’s products and services.
An external destination is fundamentally just a telephone number. It may be used directly in a Route to External Destination node within a call flow or may be added to an agent group that may then be assigned to a queue. When assigned to a queue (via a group), external destinations differ from regular agents in that a single external destination may receive multiple calls simultaneously. A limit on the maximum number of simultaneous calls permitted in total to an external destination may optionally be configured.
Where an external destination is included in a group that is assigned to queues, a call will only be routed to the external destination if there are no regular agents available to take the call.
If calls to external destinations are not answered, the Contact either backs off from sending calls to the destination or retries it later, according to the timeouts set against the external destination (not the timeouts set against the call queue).
Statistics for external destinations are not included in the agent statistics for real agents.
Profiles are supported within companies. Each company administrator can assign an External Destinations profile to a user login to define which external destinations that have been defined for the company the user can see. The External Destinations profile may permit the user to see all of the company’s external destinations or only some of them.
Roles can also be assigned to user logins. Each role can have an External destinations privilege associated with it that permits or prohibits access to the list of external destinations used by the Contact.
Company administrators and supervisors with the External destinations Modify privilege can define external destinations.
Related concept: Managing external destinations