Disaster recovery planning and overflow calls to external resource

Liberty Converse and Connect Advice
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I am hoping that someone can help me work out the best way to config an overflow type scenario. The situation would be Connect are extremely busy and unable to answer calls in a timely manner for example in extreme weather conditions and we would like to provide an over flow service to an external provider whilst still accepting calls into the Contact Centre with a easy and simple way of managing/turning on this service with calls already queueing. I am interested to hear of other organisations processes on how they manage this and if there is a simple solution. We are considering adding logic to existing dialogues which potentially results in creating additional dialogue’s but looking for something that is quick, simple and easy in an ideal world.

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HI @LynseyLeonard I love these sorts of questions :slight_smile:.

There are many different ways you could do this.

  1. Use CallBack to take the calls and call people back when an Agent is available.

  2. Use Query Blocks within your Dialogue to look up the Queue Stats and then use a Logic Block to route the caller based on this information (I wrote a post about how you can use these two blocks here.

  3. Use an Ad Hoc Message within your Dialogue to alert callers to an incident and perhaps to call back later.

Or (and my personal favourite), a mix of all of the above.

For example, An incident is happening and you need to route all/some calls to an external provider to handle the callers. You use the Ad Hoc/Closure Control message option, that is taught within the Liberty Converse: Dialogues - Builder Essentials eLearning course within the Academy.

This would allow you to play a message to alert the callers to a potential issue, at the same time you could then check the status of the Queue for length of time or number of agents and then route these callers to your external service provider (do they have a contact centre or is it just a number?). If the queue time/number of agents is acceptable, the caller will come to your normal Contact Centre. - You could enable/disable this using a phone or via the web by uploading a recording.

With the caller in the Queue, you can setup CallBack to handle any callers who are waiting for a long time to help improve your service, but also you can use the If No Agents option to then load another Dialogue which then can apply some checks to know where to route the caller to.

Now of course all of the above can sound quite scary and complicated, but actually these are relatively simple to setup. If you’d like to have a chat about the available options to you, then please feel free to drop me a message.

Many thanks, and hope this has given you some food for thought.

Jonathan Redsell

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