Redirect on No Answer (RONA) in UCCX

Today we will look at a topic that my students, attending Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) courses, is often interested in. We will talk about how to handle a call that has already been sent to the operator, but the operator did not answer it for any reason. This often happens, for example, when the operator leaves his desk and does not put his Agent Desktop in the Not Ready state. In this case, another call may come to his Agent Desktop, but since the operator does not answer, his Agent Desktop switches to the Not Ready state after the no-response timeout, and the call itself must be returned back to the queue. This scenario is called Redirect on No Answer or RONA.

Setting up RONA for UCCX is quite simple. The main part of the settings is performed in the UCCX script. Here is a script snippet with an implementation of the RONA:

As usual, the agent is selected in the script at the Select Resource step. Next, the Connect step connects to the agent. If the call was not answered, the call processing goes to the Failed branch. Here in this branch we will set up some additional steps for handling unanswered calls.

First of all, it would be nice to put the call back in the queue. There is nothing complicated about this: the usual transition with a Goto step to the SELECT_RESOURCE label will do it just fine. But what if at the moment when the current call was on the agent's console, someone else called and there were no more available agents? In such a case, this second call will be queued. When the first call returns to the queue due to non-answer, it will be in its tail. It would be quite unfair if a call that came into the system earlier, but was not answered and appeared at the tail of the queue, will be forced to wait until all other calls are processed.

To make such an unanswered call be the first in the queue, we will apply a change in its priority. This is done by the Set Priority step, which is in the Failed branch before Goto. By default, all calls have an equal and lowest priority of 1. This unanswered call should be given a higher priority, such as 7:

Thus, the unanswered call returned to the queue will have a higher priority than the rest, and, therefore, will be the first in the queue.

If you want to inform the operator that he is receiving a previously unanswered call, this can be done by passing some additional value to his console. To do this, in our test script, add the ronaFlag String variable:

 

When the call hits the Failed branch, change the value of this variable to "RONA":

And then send it to the Agent Desktop in the Set Enterprise Call Info step, matching it with the Call Peripheral Variable 10 variable of the Agent Desktop:

With this configuration, if the agent receives a call in normal mode, then the Call Peripheral Variable 10 will be empty, and if an unanswered call is received, then this variable displays the word "RONA". On this basis, the agent will be able to distinguish ordinary calls from unanswered ones.

This is how unanswered calls are handled in UCCX scripts with relatively simple methods. Have a good end of the day everyone!