Run an Inbound Call Center

Who it's for and what you get

For managers and administrators setting up a phone line for customers, and the supervisors and agents who run it.

When it is done:

• a customer who calls your number hears a welcome and, if you want one, a keypad menu;
• the call waits in the right queue, with hold music and updates on their place in line, and is offered to a free agent with the right skills;
• after hours, callers hear a closed message and are held, sent to voicemail, moved to another queue or refused, as you choose;
• agents answer in the soft phone and record the outcome; supervisors watch the queues live, listen in, and read reports.

Before you start

You need	Who sets it up
A phone provider account (such as Telnyx) with the numbers customers will call	Your administrator, with IT
The features Telephony, your provider's feature (such as Telnyx), Contact Center Work Distribution, Contact Center Inbound Entry Points, Contact Center Inbound Voice, Contact Center Agents, Telephony Soft Phone Extension, and for supervisors Contact Center Supervision & Live Dashboard and Reports. Contact Center Agent Entitlements is recommended once you have more than one team.	Your administrator, in Tools > Features
A manager role with the permissions for queues, skills, agents, business hours, voice media and omnichannel addresses	Your administrator; see Roles and permissions
The Agent role, plus Use the telephony soft phone, for everyone who answers calls; the Supervisor role for team leads	Your administrator

Can't find it?

What you see depends on your role. If the menu, a button or a setting on this page is missing, ask your administrator to give you the permission listed above or to turn on the feature. Only administrators can turn features on and change site settings.

Steps

1. Connect the phone provider. The administrator connects the provider under Settings > Communication > Telephony, and picks the default caller ID. See Phone and SMS setup.
2. List your numbers. Add each number customers call under Interaction Center > Management > Omnichannel Addresses, with Voice calls ticked. See Omnichannel addresses.
3. Set your opening hours. Create a calendar with your weekly hours and holidays under Interaction Center > Management > Business hours. See Business hours.
4. Upload hold music and prompts (optional). Add your hold music and any recorded menu prompts under Voice Media. See Voice media.
5. Create the queues. Add a queue for each team, such as Sales and Support, under Queues, with its routing strategy, service level, business hours calendar, overflow, and what callers hear while they wait. Turn on callbacks here if you want them. Queue groups are optional and only organize reports. See Queues and queue groups.
6. Decide who works each queue. Create skills such as Spanish, then give each agent their queues, priorities and skills under Agent entitlements. Give each supervisor an entitlement record with the queues they supervise too. See Skills and agent entitlements.
7. Review the break reasons. Check the reason codes agents pick when they step away, and add your own. See Agent states.
8. Route the number. Add a Voice calls entry point under Inbound entry points: pick the number, set Route to to your main queue, pick the calendar and the closed action, write the welcome message, and choose where voicemail goes. Build a keypad menu if callers should choose a department. See Inbound entry points and IVR menus.
9. Give people extensions (optional). Short internal numbers let colleagues call and transfer to each other by extension or by name. See Extensions.
10. Set the house rules. The administrator sets call recording and consent, and the outside numbers agents may transfer to, under Settings > Contact Center. See Contact Center settings.
11. Get the agents ready. Each agent installs the phone app, signs in to their queues, and records a voicemail greeting. See Browser extension and Windows app, Agent workspace and Voicemail.
12. Train agents on calls and wrap-up. Agents answer, transfer and conference in the soft phone, then complete the activity with a disposition. See Placing and handling calls, Activities and Dispositions.
13. Supervise. Supervisors watch the queues and agents, step into calls, and work the shared voicemail. See Live dashboard and Voicemail.
14. Measure. Use Call insights, Queue usage and Agent productivity to see how the line performs. See Reports.

Check that it works

1. Have an agent sign in to the queue and set themselves Available.
2. Call the number from another phone during opening hours. You should hear the welcome message and, if you built one, the menu.
3. The agent's docked agent bar and My workspace show the offer with a countdown. The agent accepts, talks, hangs up, and lands in Wrap-up until they complete the activity.
4. While the call waits or is connected, a supervisor sees it on the Live dashboard.
5. Call again with no agent available, and check that callers hear hold music and the announcements you set.
6. To test after-hours handling, call outside the calendar's hours, or add today's date to a test calendar's holidays. You should hear the closed message, then the closed action.
7. Open the Call insights report under Reports with today's date range, and find your test calls.

Tips

• Start with one queue and one entry point, test them, and add menus and overflow after.
• Clone a queue or an entry point from its Actions menu to make a similar one quickly.
• A number is answered by one enabled entry point per channel. To change where a number goes, edit its entry point.
• A disabled business hours calendar never closes anything: queues that use it are always open.
• Callbacks need the Contact Center Outbound Dialer feature; without it no callback is stored.
• Supervisors see only the queues on their own entitlement record. An empty live dashboard almost always means a missing record.
• Agents who also answer texts can use the same queues for text conversations. See Text your contacts.
• To let an AI answer the line instead, see Let the AI answer your customers.