Phone Channel Updates: Call conferencing, barging and more

As Samuel Beckett put it: Most days, the sun shines, having no alternative, on nothing new. Today, however, we’re pretty stoked to be making the sun’s day with the host of phone channel updates we have to offer.

The phone channel in Freshdesk helps you provide smart, contextual support by allowing you to bring your customer conversations into your helpdesk. By streamlining inquiries and bringing all your customer conversations to the same place, you make sure that no matter what channel the user chooses, the agent knows who’s calling, what their problem is, and has a head start on a solution before the user trills out a “Hello.”

To that end, we keep ideating, prototyping, and building features to make sure that you don’t miss out on any feature that could help you put the “exceptional” in customer support. Here’s our feature updates list:

Call Conferencing

Whoever said that two heads are better than one had no idea how prescient they were. No matter how seasoned a support rep you are, there are some situations where you just need a helping hand — sometimes, even multiple helping hands.

Say, you’re on a call with an agent, trying to solve a problem which will require the expertise of your Security team. In most call center software, you wouldn’t be able to bring a Security Expert into the call so you can solve the problem in a jiffy. Instead, you’d have to either transfer the call to your Security Expert, start an email conversation to get all three on the same page, or confer separately with the expert and then get back to the customer. None of those solutions will help the customer get a solution ASAP to the problem troubling him; one of them will make sure to frustrate the customer more even as they’re forced to explain the problem twice over.

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In Freshdesk, all you have to do is click on that little person-shaped icon, choose an agent, and mouse over to hit the “+” button to add them to the call. The more, the merrier.

Call Monitoring and Barging

Whether you consider it an evil practice or not, the best way to get a true measure of a support agent is to listen in on them when they don’t know you’re listening. This way, there’s none of that awkwardness and nervousness your agent is bound to feel knowing you, their supervisor, is listening in on the call and you get to find out, for yourself, how well your support agents treat customers.

With the latest update, all an Admin has to do to monitor a call is mouse over an ongoing call in the real-time call dashboard to join the call. The speaker button is on mute by default when you join the call.

However, even call monitoring will only get you so far. Imagine, if you will, a day where you’re checking in on your star support rockstar. It’s an important call, a high value customer and a sensitive issue – that’s why you’re checking in to make sure that everything’s going well. However, your agent’s off-kilter and the situation’s deteriorating at the speed of light. With call barging, you’ll be able to quickly step in (just unmute), expedite the situation and, if possible, provide a solution to the caller’s problem.

 

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Call Masking

When you employ call masking, you’re essentially hiding your phone number by displaying another number in its place on caller IDs. Call masking allows you to expand your support team across time zones and geographical regions, without giving your customers cause to worry for quality. It also allows you to make the reachout process a little bit more simple and homogeneous for the customer.

For instance, imagine you’re the head of customer support for…a transportation company like Uber or Lyft. If you weren’t employing call masking, you’d have to make your drivers and riders share contact information with each other, with nary a worry about privacy. However, with call masking, you could protect the driver, and the customer, by masking the driver’s cell number…with a landline number. If a customer calls the driver, their call can be forwarded to the driver’s cell. No one knows anyone’s number. Win-win for everyone!

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An Admin can mask a number from Phone Settings > Manage Caller ID in the Admin tab or the Settings tab when you purchase a number.

And Then There Were Metrics

You can also view metrics reflecting the entire lifetime of a call. Everything from IVR time, queue time, and ringing time (the amount of time the phone rang before the call connected) to speed of answer time (the time it took for the agent to attend a call) and after-call work time. The world is now your oyster.

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You can even export these metrics and analyze them in your own time, if you so please.


These features are available as a feature set for an additional price for our current (and future) customers. In addition to the add-on price, customers using call monitoring, call barging, and call conferencing will be charged a nominal amount for the time an agent/supervisor was part of the call.

If you haven’t had the chance to try out our phone channel yet, you can sign up here and try it for free.