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AurionAI

Take a call the AI hands over to you

6 min readBy Emmanuel Yazbeck

Who sees this: the person who answers the phone line your organization set for hand-overs — profiles AI Voice and AI Voice + Helpdesk. Roles: none. AurionAI calls a phone number or a phone system address, not a user account, so whoever answers that phone takes the call. That person does not need an AurionAI account. To review the call afterwards in Voice Conversations, you need a role that can read calls.

Sometimes the AI voice agent cannot or should not finish a call alone. It then calls a person and adds that person to the call. This article tells you what you hear when your phone rings for such a hand-over, and what to do.

Prerequisites

  • Your administrator set a hand-over line in Configuration > Escalation Rules, under Outbound Channel. When it is Disabled, the AI never hands a call over. Read Escalate to a human.
  • You answer the phone of that line, and you can type digits on its keypad.

When the AI hands a call over

  • The caller asks to speak to a person.
  • The caller asks to delete or disable an account in your company directory, such as Active Directory. The AI always hands these requests over.
  • Several of the AI's answers in a row are unsure. Your administrator sets how unsure (Confidence Threshold) and how many answers (Max Retry Attempts). Currently, this happens even when Automatic Escalation is off.
  • Your administrator turned on Automatic Escalation, and the caller talks about a topic in Escalation Trigger Topics.

Where your phone rings

Your administrator chooses one of two kinds of line:

  • Phone number via Twilio: AurionAI calls one phone number, for example a desk phone or a mobile phone. AurionAI places this call, so the incoming number is not the caller's own number.
  • Outbound SIP trunk: AurionAI calls an extension or address on your company's own phone system.

The phone rings for the time set in Ringing timeout (seconds), 30 seconds unless your administrator changed it.

Steps

The caller is on hold until the AI connects you. The caller does not hear the request for the code, your reply or the brief. You can hear the caller if they speak.

  1. The AI asks the caller to hold while it tries to connect them. The caller hears soft music while your phone rings. When you answer, the music stops and the caller hears nothing until the AI connects you. The caller may hear the first word you say when you answer.
  2. Answer before the ringing stops.
  3. Listen. The AI says, in English: "Human agent, to accept this call and confirm two-way audio, say ready, then press" followed by three digits.
  4. When the AI has finished speaking, say "ready" out loud. Then type the three digits on your phone keypad. Do both within about 20 seconds of answering. Digits you type while the AI is still speaking do not count. Only digits from your phone count, not digits the caller types. AurionAI also checks that sound from your phone reaches the call.
  5. The AI gives you a short brief, in English. See What the brief tells you.
  6. The AI takes the caller off hold. From now on, the caller hears you.
  7. The AI tells the caller that it is transferring them. You hear this message too. It uses the message your administrator wrote in Escalation Message, in the caller's language when your administrator wrote one for it.
  8. The AI stops talking. Greet the caller and help them.
  9. When you are done, hang up.
[Screenshot to come: The caller talks with the AI agent; the caller is put on hold while the AI agent calls you and gives you a short brief that the caller does not hear; then you and the caller talk, and the AI agent leaves the call]
Illustration: the steps of a hand-over. It is not a screen of AurionAI.

What the brief tells you

The brief is one sentence that starts with "Brief handoff: the caller needs help with" and a short description, at most about 180 characters long.

  • When the caller asked for a person, the description is the issue as the AI understood it.

  • When the AI handed over on its own, the description is the topic it detected, or says that the caller has a question the AI could not answer. Ask the caller what they need.

  • AurionAI removes sensitive values from the description first, such as phone numbers, email addresses, PINs, passwords and card numbers.

  • If AurionAI cannot be sure that the description is free of a badge number or an access code, the AI says only "Brief handoff: the caller needs help from a teammate."

  • The brief does not include a ticket number. Ask the caller for details. After the call, you can read the summary and the transcript.

Result

You are talking with the caller, and the AI only listens. After the call, the call is in Voice Conversations. A call that you accepted usually shows the outcome Escalated and the flag Escalated. Read Review voice calls.

If something goes wrong

  • You did not answer in time, voicemail answered, or the code was not accepted. The hand-over fails. AurionAI ends your part of the call, takes the caller off hold, and the AI tells the caller that it cannot connect them to a person right now. It offers to create a ticket so that someone calls them back. The code fails when no sound from your phone reaches the call, when you type it before the AI finishes speaking, when about 20 seconds pass, or after 9 digits without the right code.
  • You do not hear the request for the code. The sound does not reach you, for example because of a bad line. Hang up. The hand-over fails as above. If this happens often, ask your administrator to check the phone line.
  • Your phone never rings. The hand-over line may be Disabled or not set, or AurionAI was not allowed to make the call. For a phone number, the call uses your organization's calling credit and works only for supported countries. Ask your administrator.
  • The call drops, or you hang up while the caller is still there. The AI usually takes the call back and keeps helping the caller.
  • The call ends by itself after some time. For a phone-number line, a handed-over call can last only as long as your organization's calling credit allows, up to a maximum.
  • You want to hand an inbox conversation to another team. That is a different feature. Read Escalate, merge and link conversations.

Still stuck? Submit a request or .