Initiate outbound conversation

You can start messaging customers proactively from the Agent Desktop using the Outbound Conversations feature. Agent-initiated outbound messaging is available through SMS and Email digital channels.

Before you begin

The outbound capability is available for Premium agent licenses with access to digital channels and for businesses that have enabled digital channels.
Your account must have a multimedia profile configured to manage SMS and Email tasks to initiate a conversation.
For agents to initiate outbound digital interactions, email or social channel slots must be assigned through ‘Automatically pushed contacts’ in the multimedia profile.
You can start an outbound conversation when you're in the Available or RONA state, whether you are on a voice call, engaged in a digital interaction, or idle with no tasks assigned.

1	Sign in to Webex Contact Center Desktop.
2	Click the New outbound conversation icon in the top navigation bar. A pop-up window with the list of channels appears on the screen. If an agent is assigned an email or social channel using the 'Manual assignment' setting in Control Hub, outbound digital channels will not be available to that agent. If you don’t see the digital channel in the list, contact your administrator to ensure the 'Automatically pushed contacts' setting is properly configured.
3	Choose a channel. You can initiate an outbound task only with a unique customer mobile number/email ID and Entry Point combination. If you’ve reached the maximum limit for outbound tasks configured in the multimedia profile policy assigned to you, you can’t initiate more conversations. The system displays the corresponding reason codes.
4	In the To field, Enter the mobile number using the country code for the SMS channel. Enter the email address for the Email channel.
5	In the From drop-down list, select an entry point (SMS or Email). If your administrator hasn’t configured any entry points, you can’t start an outbound conversation.
6	Click New SMS or Email. The application creates a new conversation within a few seconds, automatically accepting an outbound task offered in the left pane. If the outbound creation fails, an error message appears in the following scenarios: An active conversation with the entered number or email address is already in progress. Task creation or assignment to the agent failed due to internal system errors.
7	You can perform the following tasks in the interaction control pane while you're handling an outbound conversation: You can handle a voice call. You can handle other digital interactions.
8	Enter the text in the composer or use Templates to send messages to the customers. The application links all subsequent customer responses to this existing customer ID, ensuring a smooth and organized conversation flow. To effectively start an outbound email conversation, choose a unique subject you haven't used in previous customer conversations. The email channel on Webex Connect for Contact Center integrated tenants does not support inline images due to PCI restrictions. If your organization is not on the exceptional list, agents can attach inline images with a size limit of 15KB. This size restriction is a default limit, and you cannot configure it. The system hosts inline images in the outbound email response on Cisco solution's AWS S3 buckets and marks them as URLs in image tags within the HTML body. These URLs are subject to a standard data retention policy of six months. The Webex Contact Center Email channel does not support multi-part emails that contain Content-ID (CID) attachments.
9	(Optional) You can trigger a workflow.
10	Click Send or press Enter on your keyboard. Currently, you can’t initiate conference for outbound conversations. Also, you can’t trigger workflows such as Task created, Task routed, Task ended, and so on, during an outbound conversation. If you close the conversation, the system creates a new conversation while preserving its historical context.

Transfer outbound conversation

If you can’t resolve a customer’s issue by the end of the shift, you can transfer it to the queue or another agent.

Before you begin

You must have accepted the SMS or Email request.

1	During the conversation, click Transfer to transfer an active SMS or Email conversation request to the Queue or an Agent.
2	Choose from one of the following: Queue— Select a queue from the drop-down list or use the search field to filter the list. The drop-down list displays the available queues. Agent— Select an agent from the drop-down list or use the search field to filter the list. The drop-down list displays the names of available agents.
3	(Optional) Click icon to retrieve the most recent list of queues and agents. The retrieved list displays the current agent availability states.
4	Click Transfer. You can transfer a single Agent initiated outbound task at a time. The application drops the request if an agent doesn't accept the transferred chat request.

What to do next

The Wrap-Up Reasons dialog box appears.

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Initiate outbound conversation

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