Agent-First Dialer Campaigns

Agent-first campaigns put your licensed agents on the phone while careCycle handles dialing, pacing, routing, follow-up, and reporting. Use them when a conversation needs a person but your team still needs a managed queue and a repeatable workflow.

Create an Agent-First Campaign

From Campaigns > New Campaign, choose Agent-first campaign, enter a name, and choose how the campaign reaches people:

• Outbound dialer calls leads or customers through a Pulse cadence.
• Inbound desk waits for customers to call its numbers. It can optionally use Pulse for disposition-triggered follow-up.

This direction is permanent after creation. Create a new campaign if you need to change an outbound dialer into an inbound desk, or the reverse.

The new campaign is created as a draft and opens directly on Routing & Handling. careCycle also attempts to provision the campaign's first softphone number. Before either direction can be activated, attach an enabled softphone transfer destination with a routing configuration. An outbound dialer also needs a Pulse workflow.

Routing and Destination Ownership

The attached softphone transfer destination is the campaign's agent pool. It owns the agents, routing strategy, ring timers, agent screen, handoff settings, inbound callback policy, and inbound voicemail greetings. The campaign does not keep separate copies of those settings.

Destinations can be shared. Editing one changes every campaign and Receptionist behavior that references it. See Transfer Destinations before changing a shared pool.

Only agents who are online, Available, active in the routing configuration, on the air for this campaign, and eligible under any state-licensing filter enter the routing sequence. Attributed inbound and outbound calls also apply campaign source restrictions. Priority overrides can put the customer's assigned agent or most recent softphone agent first. The remaining agents are ordered by one of these strategies:

Agents always ring one at a time in the resulting sequence. Balanced does not ring everyone simultaneously.

Ring duration per agent accepts 5 through 30 whole seconds. Max wait time accepts 10 through 120 whole seconds. The overall wait limit can stop the sequence before every eligible agent is tried. If no eligible agent exists, fallback starts immediately.

When an agent has Auto Answer enabled, or your organization enforces it, the softphone joins the routed call without waiting for the agent to select Answer or Claim. The ring timers do not delay an auto-answered call. Only Available agents receive a route. See Agent Availability and Auto-Answer.

Pulse Calls Are Dial-First

Normal agent-first Pulse calls always use dial-first answering-machine detection (AMD), including follow-up calls from an inbound desk campaign:

If no agent is available before the customer is dialed, the attempt waits and is retried instead of consuming the customer's place in the cadence. If AMD has already confirmed a live person but no agent accepts before the pool or wait limit is exhausted, careCycle plays a recorded unavailable message, hangs up, marks the call abandoned, and returns the customer to the queue.

The destination's inbound greeting is unrelated to answering-machine handling on Pulse calls. Configure the outbound default under Routing & Handling > Outbound Pulse voicemail; a Pulse call step can inherit it, override it, or choose silent hangup.

The agent's wrap-up disposition maps to an outcome type such as Contacted, No Contact, Voicemail, Sale, No Sale, Callback, or Do Not Call. Pulse routes the customer's next step from that outcome.

Inbound Handling

Every active agent-first campaign can receive calls on its campaign numbers, including callbacks to numbers used by an outbound dialer.

• During business hours, the attached destination's eligible agents ring in sequence.
• Outside business hours, agents do not ring. careCycle speaks the destination's after-hours greeting and hangs up.
• If the in-hours agent sequence is exhausted, careCycle offers the destination's callback IVR when it is enabled and the caller is eligible. Otherwise it speaks the business-hours greeting and hangs up.

For agent-first inbound fallback, "voicemail" is a text-to-speech greeting followed by hangup. It is not a mailbox and does not record a caller message. Destination greetings fall back to organization greetings, then careCycle's built-in greeting. Voice AI appointment fallback and phone-number fallback settings on the same destination do not run for agent-first campaigns.

An inbound desk call is a reactive touch and does not automatically enter Pulse. When a normal Pulse follow-up is scheduled for that customer and campaign, careCycle links the outbound call to that exact Pulse event and uses the dial-first flow above. The requested-callback flow below remains separate. The client campaign page does not expose a Pulse tab for inbound desks, so an inbound follow-up workflow must currently be attached through an admin or API configuration path.

Inbound Callback Exception: Accept-First

An eligible caller who waits through the agent sequence can press 1 to leave the live queue and receive a callback. Configure this on the attached destination under Inbound agent-first fallback.

If the caller declines, gives no input, or becomes ineligible, careCycle continues to the normal TTS greeting and hangup. Calling again while a callback is pending does not create a duplicate request. If the caller reaches an agent before callback dialing starts, the pending request is canceled.

Callback settings have these bounds and defaults:

The window must be at least the number of attempts multiplied by the retry delay. Actual expiry is the earlier of the configured window or the end of the closing buffer. A customer no-answer retries after the configured delay until the attempt limit or expiry. If agents become unavailable again after dispatch, careCycle re-arms the request after 60 seconds, still bounded by expiry. A request that cannot be completed in time expires without dialing again.

Managers can monitor both outbound customers waiting for agent-first calls and inbound callback promises under Wallboard > Queue & Callbacks. Campaign rows drill into the filtered Customers list, while callback reporting shows queue age, attempts, fulfillment, and expiry risk without exposing customer contact details on the wallboard itself.