Sometimes your callers really mess things up for you.
You’ve spent hours building and tweaking and testing your Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Music on hold. Audio prompts. Web services to tie the call together with a contact in your CRM.
The visual IVR builder gives you plenty of options for collecting data, sending data, and routing calls. The drag-and-drop interface lets you get your IVR built fast so you can test and perfect it.
The built-in features are fantastic for collecting data about calls and updating your CRM. Or even letting your agents know a call came in. But, sometimes you need to guarantee that the information goes into your CRM.
Then the caller hangs up before that can happen.
Why?!
As an aside, here’s a quick checklist you can use to look for problems:
- Did you set Music On Hold to play while calling your web service? Otherwise, it may sound like dead air.
- Did your web service fail? Did the channel hang up as a result, or is the IVR set to follow the “Fail” branch in that case?
- Did the web service take too long to return? You may need to adjust the wait limit, and double check 2) to make sure you can handle failure.
- Are you waiting too long to send the data? For example, does the caller have to listen to three audio prompts before you get to the web service? If so, try to make that happen before the prompts. Maybe you can background the audio file and have the web service call happen sooner.
If everything checks out, maybe your caller just wanted to hang up. It happens.
So your caller hung up. Usually, that means the call ends. Even if it was in the middle of a web service call, the response won’t get handled because the channel has moved on.
So how do you get that information out when the caller has hung up?
The Visual IVR Builder does give you a tool to get around that. It’s called the “Hangup Page.” Every dialplan built with it has one, even if you don’t use it. Whatever you put in the Hangup Page gets processed after the call is hung up.
What can you do in the Hangup Page?
Most of the same stuff you can do in regular IVR pages. There are a few restrictions, though. You cannot:
- Transfer the call out
- Transfer the call to a different page in the same dialplan
- Transfer the call to an extension or other PBX item
- Play audio into the call
- Go into a queue
You can branch, do lookups, set variables, make web service requests, and all those other things you might want to do.
This is handy in cases where the caller could hang up at any time and you need to do some processing anyway. If you’re updating your CRM, you can at least tell that the caller called in and when. What you want to do with that data is up to you. We just want to make sure that you can get it.