Telephony

Quick links in this article:

This article will explore the use of telephony (voice calls) in Gnatta and the features that are available to you. If you’re looking for information regarding SMS specifically, check this article: SMS  

Key features

Gnatta provides a toolkit of critical telephony features - here are the headlines:

• Inbound Calls

• Outbound Calls

• Caller Id Masking

• Call Recording

• IVR Support & Routing

• Custom Voice Messages

• Custom Hold Music

• Out of hours routing and messaging

• Channel hop from other channels into telephony

• Hold and Mute controls

• Agent Transfer 

• SMS CSAT

• Call Forwarding

• Call Porting

Bringing an existing number

Already have a phone number that you’d like to use in Gnatta? We support call forwarding and porting, so you don’t need to update your brand materials. However, it’ll involve some liaison with our telephony 3rd party (Twilio), and yours. Please get in touch so we can support you through the process.

There are two ways to use an existing telephone number in your Gnatta account:

Call forwarding

Redirects incoming calls from one number to another, regardless of the provider. Call forwarding keeps the number's old account association, and you can still use the original number. This is useful if you are locked into a contract with your current provider and porting is not an option.

Call porting

Also known as transferring, porting is the permanent process of moving a phone number from one provider to another. The old account associated with the number is closed. Porting can be useful for businesses that want to switch providers without having to tell customers about the change. The phone number stays the same, so customers can continue to reach the business without interruption. However, porting may incur a fee, depending on the providers involved. 

Purchasing a number

Before you can purchase a number in Gnatta, you must submit a verification bundle for each telephone number you need. The information you’ll need to provide includes:

• Business address

• Emergency address (physical address where emergency services can send help)

• Business website address

• Authorised representative information such as name, phone number, and work email

• An excerpt from the commercial register if the business is not registered with the UK Companies House

Bundles are generally approved by our telephony partner within 3 working days - although often much quicker, so check back often!

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Submit a bundle for your phone number(s)

Once your bundle has been approved, you’ll be able to purchase a number and start setting up your telephony account. From the Bundles overview, select ‘Phone’ under Advanced channels on the left to get to the Advanced settings.

Click + Add to get started, selecting the bundle you’ve had approved.

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Select a ‘Mobile' compliance bundle

Once you’ve selected the compliance bundle, you’ll be able to choose a new number from the list. Click ‘Confirm’ when you’re ready to proceed.

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Select a number from the list and Confirm

Once you’ve confirmed, the number will appear in your list of phone accounts. If it’s a Mobile number, you’ll be able to see SMS is enabled, and the relevant inbound and outbound streams under the account details.

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Ensure you’ve created an account with SMS enabled

Now that your account has been added, you can upload hold music or use the Caller ID functionality to mask your Gnatta number. Please get in touch if you need help setting this up.

Finally, don’t forget to map a team to the account by switching to the Teams tab. It’s critical you select a Team, because this is how Gnatta determines:

• Who is allowed to respond - for security purposes, only users who are in a team mapped to the account can respond to those interactions, regardless of whether they’re assigned on their radar.

• What availability there is - based on the opening hours schedule of the team(s) associated to the account. If an interaction is received after hours, you can create workflows to handle it differently

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Assign a team to your new account

After adding your account

When you add your Telephony account the key stream to take note of is Voice Inbound. You’ll be setting up a Call Started event in Workflow based on that stream. But first - you’ll need a routing plan, users, data and queues! For next steps, go here:

About IVR journeys

Please press 1 for sales, or 2 for customer service. For anything else, please press 3.

Looking for something like that? IVR (interactive voice response) journeys in Gnatta are as straightforward as it gets. With our visual flow builder, you can map out your automated caller journeys using keypress instructions (also known as DTMF tones) or voice recognition. Use Voice Input, Audio Out and Decision actions to create the branching paths of your journey, and connect callers to the right person every time.

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Handling missed calls

• Call abandoned before reaching an agent? You can use the Call Ended event in Workflow to decide what to do with missed or abandoned calls - such as moving them into a Call Back queue to be picked up when an agent is available.

• Calling out of hours? Add a branch to your IVR flow to collect key customer data and arrange a call back.

The agent experience

Calls are presented to the agent in the interaction radar, with an audible alert, and buttons to ‘Accept’ or ‘Reject’ the call.

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Calls are presented to agents in the interaction radar, alongside other interactions

On selection, the interaction timeline will contain events depending on how the call is progressing; such as the call being received, answered, recording started, disconnections, or ending. Once the call is accepted, agents can access a range of call controls in place of the reply box, including call recording, hold, or a keypad.

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Call controls whilst a call is in progress

Once a call has finished, agents can append notes to the interaction, update custom fields as required and close the interaction when they’re ready to move on by changing a status field to ‘Closed’.

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Agents can attach notes and update key data before closing the interaction

By limiting the agent capacity for telephony to 1, you can ensure agents will not receive anymore calls until they’ve set the interaction to a Closed state.

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Agent receives a new call only after setting the first to a Closed state