When a conversation starts in Microsoft Omnichannel for Customer Service app the agent typically sees a notification including the ability to reject the call. Or if they miss the notification a wait timer will eventually hide the notification. That is great but what happens after the conversation is missed or rejected??

When a conversation is missed or the agent rejects the work item, it will be reconsidered in the routing and hopefully assigned to another agent. But sometimes the agent that has just rejected or missed the conversation maybe the only available person. When that happens, the same conversation might be immediately represented to the same agent again.

From the agents’ point of view that might be frustrating! But sometimes it is exactly what should happen. As we really need the agent to engage with the waiting customer.

But sometimes you might want to implement an alternative approach. For example, what if the agents is showing as online but in reality is away. We wouldn’t want to repeated send the work item to them! Or maybe an agent has just rejected the conversation as they are in the middle of something urgent and simply can’t take the call right now.

Luckily, we do have some configuration settings that can influence the way these notifications are presented and what will happen if they are missed.

To control your notification behaviour, open the “Customer Service Admin Center”. And look for the “Notification Templates” option. This will be within the “Workspaces” option.

With the notifications we have several options that maybe of interest! I will start by mentioning the “Missed Notifications” tab.

On this tab we can enable a option to change the agent status to “inactive” if a conversation is missed.

Now (as you can see below), after a notification has been missed the agent status will change to “Away”. So assuming you don’t route conversations to agents that are away their notifications will now stop until they change their status back to available.

Next, we have the agent reject tab. This contains a similar feature that will automatically set the agent status is “do not disturb”. On the assumption that if the agent has started to reject calls they must be bust with something else!

Below you can see that after rejecting a notification the agent will see a notification and their status will change to do not disturb.

The next tab that might be useful to ensure your agents see (or hear) notifications in the first place is the sound notification settings. Once enabled you can set different sounds for incoming conversations on different channels.

If you do want to enable sound notifications, you might need to be aware that you may need to “tweak” one of your browser settings. As you need to allow media autoplay. In Edge you do this in the settings area. Under “Cookies and site permissions” you will find the media autoplay option. You could simply enable autoplay for all sites. Or alternatively, it is possible to just allow certain sites. (As you can see, I have done below.)

You may also want to look at the settings for specific notifications. Below you can see that I have navigated to the “Templates” tab and then searched for my chat related notifications.

Opening one of the notifications will show a few options that might be useful!

Including the ability to change the amount of time before a conversation is considered missed. I think reducing this might help ensure the customer is connected quickly. For example, maybe the call should be re-routed after say 30 seconds rather than the default 120 seconds!

Tip:
you could also disable the timer completely. I assume then the work item is going to wait (and wait) until the agent answers. You might want to experiment with that! But in my opinion a timer is always useful to cover those situations when the agent has walked away from their desk without marking themselves as away.

Another option that might be significant is to disable the ability for agents to reject work items. Maybe there are some channels that you simply want the agent to always accept. Why should the agent be allowed to reject an incoming phone call in the first place??

Hopefully you can see that we have quite a bit of control over how notifications are presented. And also importantly what happens if the notification is missed or rejected. Enjoy.