Any one who has spent time on a phone will have had this happen to them. One minute you are talking and the next, the caller is gone. Or you put someone on hold and you go to pick them back up and they are no longer there. When this happens, you want to know, ‘Who hung up the call?’
I would like to talk just a bit about the mechanics of a hang up, how you can use Webmanager to find out exactly where the disconnect came from, and some common reasons for calls to ‘hang up unexpectedly’.
Telecommunication networks provide directional call supervision information. Which is to say, that one side of the call or the other will send a message indicating that the call or the connection should be torn down. This typically is initiated by the phone device on one end or the other of the phone call. In an environment like NICE CXone, the agent can also CANCEL the call, instructing NICE CXone to initiate the tear down of the call. Occasionally, there will be network problems that cause calls to tear down. When this happens, people often want to know why.
Because this is not information that is needed for billing or contact processing, it is not kept in either billing or contact history. Manually determining who hung up the call is an awkward technical process. That process has changed! Now, using Webmanager, anyone that can view contact history can determine who hung up the call. Simply login to Webmanger and go to view contact history, and open a specific contact ID. There is now a ‘Disconnected By’ flag that will show if the call was terminated by the caller, the agent or NICE CXone itself. This puts the ability to research this directly in the hands of the call center manager.
Figuring out WHY the call was hung up is more difficult. In most cases the phone network does not provide many details about why a call was terminated. Occasionally, you will get a release cause type that indicates that there was a network problem but in most cases you just get a NORMAL RELEASE. In truth, calls end for any number of reasons. People just hang up, they pull the phone cord out of the wall, cell phones of course are notorious, people drop phones, they push the wrong buttons, their batteries die, or have to go, or can’t wait. Occasionally there are network failures, or even phone system failures, and power outages, and cut cables and fires. Truth is, I have seen many incidents of disconnected or dropped calls, but very few are caused by the phone switch or the software just hanging up.
Every phone call is important and valuable and at NICE CXone we work hard to ensure that you capture each one, and when you unexpectedly lose a call, we work to provide you with the information you need to answer that question, ‘Who hung up the call?’
