Creating basic conference calls with Plivo is easy. But what if you want more control for advanced contact center and sales dialer use cases, such as:
- being able to dial out to another agent or supervisor directly from the call
- being able to do a warm transfer to another agent
- enabling a supervisor to coach an agent without the customer listening to it
- playing custom background audio to different parties
At Plivo, we understand how important it is for call centers and sales teams to monitor the performance of their agents using recorded calls as reference for training. Gathering insights driven by AI technologies helps improve the overall quality of their service.
That’s why we’re excited to announce our multiparty calls component in public beta, which gives customers the ability to assign roles like agent, customer, and supervisor to participants of a call. Using this, businesses can manage the user experience programmatically by adding and removing agents on the call, performing warm and cold transfers, and enabling supervisor coaching. Multiparty calls can be used for standard multiparty audio bridges, inbound contact centers, and outbound sales dialers, for up to 10 participants.
For traditional “meeting” use cases where more participants may need to be connected, please checkout our conference offering.
Here are some great features that can help you enhance your experience with our multiparty call component.
Assign agent and customer roles
Businesses can assign users roles and trigger different permissions accordingly. You can configure a multiparty call so that the agent can initiate and manage transfers, and can even specify different hold music to be played to the agent and the customer. You can also assign a ”supervisor” role to appropriate stakeholders so they have the ability to monitor calls as they see fit.
Coaching functionality
Businesses can also take advantage of coaching functionality. A coach participant can talk to one participant without the other caller hearing the audio. This is a must-have in call centers that want agents to perform well and provide excellent service. Coaching provides a way for call center agents to learn new skills, get feedback on the work they’re doing in real time, and get to the heart of problems they’re experiencing.
Call recording controls
Businesses will have the flexibility to determine which parts of the conversations are recorded. This means adding commands to record the leg of any conference call. This is especially useful when an agent wants to start a call recording only after the customer provides consent to record, or pause an active recording when collecting payment information. Many agents need to collect PII (personally identifiable information), but it could be a liability to have that information stored in a recording if it isn’t necessary. Many prefer to pause the recording while collecting the PII, then resuming the recording immediately afterward.
You can even go as far as setting controls at the participant level, so that if a supervisor is on the call to coach an agent in real time, you can configure the recording to only be inclusive of the customer’s audio.
Warm transfers
Finally, businesses can add people to an in-progress phone call to provide a seamless customer experience — also known as a warm transfer. Some businesses have a receptionist speak with the appropriate agent before they send a call to them, or a representative from one department briefs another colleague about the inquiry at hand before transferring the customer. Typically, a caller is put on hold while the call center operator dials the desired extension. After being notified, the transfer destination can then accept the call and complete the transfer. Taking a moment to make sure the transfer recipient has all pertinent info goes a long way in customer service toward ensuring clients’ continued happiness.
Multiparty calling programmatically adds the right participants at the right time to streamline customer support and virtual coaching sessions and consultations, while also assigning proper user permissions using only participants’ phone numbers. And getting started is easy — just check out our thorough API Reference Guide to learn more.
Plivo’s multiparty calling component is available in public beta. Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started only takes five minutes! Sign up today.
