Callbacks and recovery

What a callback is

A callback is a call you promised a person, at a time they chose. It belongs to their journey. Callbacks are dialed before anyone else in the campaign. They still pass every safety check at the moment of the call, including calling hours.

A callback is made in one of three ways:

• The bot. The person says “call me tomorrow” and the bot books it. If the bot ends the call for a callback without a time, a default of a day ahead is used.
• An agent. They save the result “Callback”, or schedule one from the person’s page. See saving a result.
• A supervisor or admin. Open the journey or the person, press Schedule a callback, choose Call back at, add a note for whoever calls.

A callback is Waiting, Calling now, Done, Cancelled or Missed. Missed means the person could not be reached and has run out of tries. A manager can press Cancel callback on a waiting one.

A stop request is not a callback

If the reason or the note on a callback is a request to stop, such as “stop calling”, “don’t call me” or “take me off”, no callback is made. The person is marked Asked to stop, any waiting callbacks are cancelled, and the number is added to your own do-not-call list. If the safety checks are down at that moment, the number is queued and sent again until they accept it. See do-not-call.

Important

Only callbacks are read for stop requests. If a person says “stop calling me” and an agent saves it as a note on a different result, such as not interested, the person is not added to the do-not-call list. Always save the result Do not call.

When a hand-over fails

A hand-over is a call passed from a bot to your team. If it fails, the bot stays with the person. It says honestly that nobody could pick up just now and offers a callback. The agent who was set aside is freed. The journey goes back to In progress.

What went wrong	What the journey shows
Nobody on your team was free	“Nobody on your team was free.” The person’s priority is raised so they are tried before others next time.
The agent did not accept in time	“The agent who was set aside did not pick up in time”, or “It did not go through” with the reason. The wait is 20 seconds by default and can be set from 5 to 60 seconds on the campaign. A set-aside agent is freed after 30 seconds at most.
The connection to the agent failed	“It did not go through”, with the reason.
The person hung up while waiting	“The person hung up while waiting.”

Only “nobody free” raises the priority. See when nobody is free.

When a server dies mid-call

If the phone server stops while calls are up, those calls are cut. When it comes back, each one is closed with the reason “The call was cut by a server problem.” Then:

1. The journey goes to In recovery.
2. A callback is made, due now, with the reason node_failure.
3. The person is raised to the highest priority.
4. The attempt is not counted against the person.
5. The recording the server had saved to disk is repaired and filed. The bot’s session is stopped.

The callback is dialed first and still passes every safety check.

What a supervisor sees

• A journey in In recovery (a warning badge) with a callback marked Waiting, due now.
• On the floor, the cut calls are gone, and an alert says the server “is not working”. See alerts.
• On the journey, the hand-overs section shows what failed. See reading a journey.

Not yet

Hand-over failures and the server-kill recovery were tested only with the phone simulator and the stand-in AI, never with real carriers or the real AI. The kill test cuts calls by stopping the simulated phone server. With FreeSWITCH, calls the server still holds after a restart are not taken over: they are closed as cut only once FreeSWITCH stops listing them.