Accept inbound phone interactions

As an 8x8 Contact Center agent, you are ready to process new phone interactions when you change your status to Available. If you are assigned to a phone queue, you are offered the interactions waiting to be served in that queue. For an overview of an inbound call flow, refer to Inbound Phone Call Flow.

To accept an inbound phone interaction:

  1. In the Control Panel, change your status to Available.
    8x8 Agent ConsoleClosed8x8 Contact Center's browser-based graphical user interface (GUI) used by Agents to manage customer interactions. offers new phone interactions only to available agents assigned to an enabled phone queue.

    Note: The Reject interaction button is disabled if your contact center administrator has not granted the permission. This prevents agents from rejecting the interactions they are offered.

  2. When your agent telephone rings, answer the call. The call can be accepted manually or connected automatically via Auto Answer. If AgentClosedAgents use the Agent Console to view and manage customer interactions. Virtual Contact Center supports Regular agents and Supervisor agents. whisper is set up for your tenant, you may hear a whisper informing you about the connected call upon connection. For details about whisper, see our content in Agent whisper for phone queues.
  3. Your status changes to Busy. If the Local CRM uses the caller's phone number to identify an existing customer, the Display Panel pops the customer's CRM record.

    Note: Your contact center administrator determines the event that triggers a screen pop. Based on the configuration, screen pop may occur before or after accepting or completing an interaction.

    Note: If the screen pop fails to open, clean up your browser cache and cookies and log back in.

  4. Process the call. If the customer wishes to make a payment using a credit card, click to open the 8x8 Secure Pay. While your connection is still maintained with the caller, you can only hear a single-tone DTF and see the starred out digits for the card number. For details, see our content on handling payments via 8x8 Secure Pay.
  5. If required, select the Transaction CodeClosedThe Transaction Codes feature enables agents to supply supplemental information about the reason for or outcome of an interaction. Transaction codes provide enhanced metrics or enable the calling line ID on an outbound call to be modified. For example, transaction codes could be created for different categories of sales activities such as Initial Contact, Prospect, Customer Satisfied, and so on. before ending the call.

    Note: If your contact center administrator has set up codes to state the purpose of an interaction or record the outcome of an interaction, you have to select appropriate codes to indicate the call outcome. For more information, see Select Transaction Codes.

  6. Click End Call in the Control Panel to initiate the post-processing countdown timer. Your status changes to Post Processing. If configured by administrator, the post-processing time for direct-to-agent calls can be up to 60 minutes.
    If the post-processing countdown interval reaches zero, 8x8 Agent Console automatically sets your status to Available.
  7. Click End Post Processing to make your status Available, or click Work Offline if you need more time to complete any post-processing tasks.
    The system routes the next call to the agent who has been idle the longest. By default, agents are considered idle from the time they end post-processing of a system-delivered, queued interaction. For details, see our content regarding agent's idle timer.

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