I’m managing a high-volume predictive dialer campaign. We’ve set a ‘Max ACW’ (After Call Work) limit of 60 seconds on the queue to keep agents moving.
The problem: when an agent is assigned a ‘Callback’ interaction from the campaign, they often need more than 60 seconds to review the customer’s history before clicking ‘Dial’. The platform seems to treat this ‘Pre-Call’ state as ACW time from the previous interaction. Once they hit 60 seconds, the system force-changes their status to ‘Unavailable’ (due to exceeding Max ACW), which then breaks the current callback interaction and prevents them from dialing.
How can I allow agents more time for callback prep without increasing the global Max ACW for standard inbound calls?
This is a classic ‘Outbound vs Inbound’ configuration conflict. The ‘Max ACW’ on the Queue is a global setting that doesn’t distinguish between a ‘Post-Call’ state and a ‘Pre-Call’ callback state.
The fix is to use ‘Preview Dialer’ mode for those specific callback segments if you can, or better yet, move your callback handling to a separate Queue with a more generous ACW limit. You can use an Architect flow to route callbacks to a ‘Callback-Only’ queue where the agents have 180 seconds of ACW for prep.
We had this at our small shop too. We found that if the agent is in ‘Preview’ mode, the timer doesn’t start until they actually close the preview window. If they are in ‘Power’ or ‘Predictive’ mode, the system is much more aggressive.
If you don’t want to change queues, look into using ‘Manual ACW’ for that specific campaign’s queue and then use a Script to enforce a ‘Soft’ timer that alerts the agent rather than force-changing their status. This gives them the flexibility they need for complex callbacks while still giving you the data to coach the slow ones.
From a gamification perspective, we actually track ‘ACW Violations’ as a negative point. If you use the separate queue approach that Han mentioned, you can set different gamification thresholds for the ‘Standard’ vs ‘Callback’ queues. This way, agents aren’t penalized for taking the time they actually need to prepare for a successful callback!