Hey guys! We are testing out a new agentless outbound campaign using a Dialog Engine voice bot instead of just playing a static audio message. The goal is to have the bot ask customers if they want to confirm their delivery time. The problem is that the bot starts speaking its opening line (‘Hello, calling about your delivery!’) immediately when the call connects, before the customer even says anything. If the customer takes two seconds to say hello, they miss the start of the sentence! How do we make the outbound voice bot wait for the customer to speak first?
Oh, this is such a common gotcha when setting up outbound bots! I saw this all the time when moving clients from Zendesk! You cannot just attach the bot directly to the outbound campaign! You have to configure Answering Machine Detection (AMD) on the campaign! When AMD is turned on, the dialer waits until it detects a live human voice. Once it detects ‘Hello’, it triggers the Architect Outbound Call Flow, and THEN your bot starts talking! The bot itself doesn’t know how to wait, it relies entirely on the AMD engine to pass control at the exact right moment!
I troubleshoot these outbound AMD flows constantly. The previous reply is partially correct, but it misses a critical configuration step. Even if you turn on AMD, the Dialog Engine Bot Flow will still try to play its initial greeting if you do not suppress it.
Inside the Bot Flow, you must check the box for ‘Suppress Initial Greeting’ when invoking it from an Outbound Call Flow. Because the customer already said ‘Hello’ to trigger the AMD, you do not want the bot to say ‘Hello’ back.
You want the bot to immediately start with the ‘Ask for Intent’ action. Otherwise, the conversation flow is incredibly awkward and confusing.
Hello. I optimize the routing for these exact scenarios. You must also be very careful with the AMD timeout settings on your Edge groups.
If the AMD timeout is set to the default value, the silence detection might fail if the customer says hello very softly. Furthermore, if you are doing skills-based routing after the bot interaction, please remember that the bot interaction time is added to your total campaign handle time metrics.
You must build your analytics reports to subtract the bot duration, otherwise your outbound agent efficiency metrics will look terrible.