Pulse
What Pulse is, how it ties your campaign's calls and messages together, and how Voice AI and Agent-first pulses differ.
What is Pulse?
Pulse is the omnichannel workflow builder for a campaign. It's where you lay out what happens, and when, from the first attempt to reach a customer through every follow-up. In one place you configure:
- Contact cadences (when and how often to reach out)
- Time delays and loop conditions
- Calls, with pre-call SMS and voicemail options
- SMS messages and templates
- What happens after each call, based on its outcome
Every call in a Pulse produces a disposition (its outcome), and you route each outcome to the next step: wait and try again, send a text, or stop. That routing is the heart of a Pulse.
Voice AI vs Agent-first pulses
Pulses come in two flavors, matching your campaign type. They share the same building blocks (the same nodes, SMS, dispositions, waits, and loops), and differ mainly in who handles the call and how a disposition is set.
Calls are placed and handled by your AI employee.
- A call node triggers an outbound AI call (or represents an inbound AI call).
- The disposition is determined automatically at the end of each call from what happened on the line and in the conversation.
- How the assistant handles questions and escalates (transfer, book an appointment, or raise an inquiry) is controlled by Assistant Behaviors, configured on the assistant.
Calls are handled by your live agents through the careCycle softphone.
- For a normal outbound call, careCycle dials the customer first and always runs answering machine detection (AMD). It rings agents only after AMD confirms a live person.
- Dialing is paced to live agent availability. If no agent is ready before a call starts, the customer stays queued without consuming an attempt.
- If a live customer has been confirmed but no agent accepts, careCycle plays the required abandonment message, records Abandoned, and returns the customer to the queue without advancing Pulse.
- Requested callbacks are the exception: careCycle rings an agent first and dials the customer only after the agent accepts.
- The disposition is set by the agent at wrap-up (for example, Sale, No Sale, Callback Scheduled). Deterministic system outcomes such as No Answer and Voicemail are set automatically.
The rest of this section (nodes, SMS, dispositions, and error handling) applies to both types. Where the two differ, the page says so.
In this section
Watching a Live Pulse
Once a campaign is running, the Pulse builder has a live view (the Live
toggle, or ?view=live on the URL) that overlays how many customers are
sitting at each step right now. It is the quickest way to see where a cohort
is bunching up, for example a wait step holding everyone until tomorrow's
window.
Nodes and Configuration
The node types that make up a Pulse, how to configure a call node, and sending SMS (templates, pre-call SMS, personalization).
Dispositions and Routing
How call outcomes are grouped and routed to the next step.
Error Handling and Retries
What the platform retries for you, and how retries interact with business hours and TCPA.