Loss of connection to agent's Communication Panel

This section describes how Sinch Contact Pro behaves if an agent loses network connection while handling conversations.

Sinch Contact Pro has built-in resilience for short network problems. The chat and email channels are more tolerant to short network breaks compared to the voice channel where an outage for a few seconds can affect the audio stream.

Common for all channel types:

  • Metadata such as scripting and internal memos: if the agent loses the internet connection, all unsaved metadata is lost after the resilience time.

  • If an agent closes the browser window or tab accidentally, the built-in resilience keeps the agent logged in approximately one minute before disconnecting the user session. During this time the agent can come back and continue working normally.

Voice channel

Phone calls are lost if the browser window or tab is closed, or if the agent loses network connection. If the agent returns during resilience time, they can finish scripting and other wrap-up activities. To reconnect with customers, the agent needs to call back.

In practice if an agent's internet connection becomes unstable or lost (~30 seconds) the SIP registration will be affected. Communication Panel will take action to inform the agent in Communication Panel via its banner messaging feature while also taking measures to disable call capabilities. Once the internet connection is stable to establish a SIP registration again call capabilities are restored.

If the agent loses the internet connection, the disconnect party is identified as agent in the Conversation Details view of the Dashboard user interface.

Email channel

Ongoing email conversations are maintained if the browser window or tab is closed, or if the agent loses network connection.

Chat channel

This channel includes all conversational channels: web chat, social channels, and SMS.

Sinch Contact Pro has a built-in mechanism to return chat conversation back to the original queue if the agent loses the internet connection and the connection doesn’t return during resilience time. You can also inform the customer about the situation by configuring a prompt in System Configurator. For more information, see the Queue Management section in the System Configurator documentation.

Note that the conversation will keep its original queue arrival time to maintain position in the queue.

Technically the feature closes original chat, sets status as handled and creates a new conversation to the original queue. The newly created chat is in queue and available for automatic allocation or manual picking. In the Conversation Details view of the Dashboard user interface you can identify the case where the agent has lost the internet connection with the following: Disconnect reason: AgentSessionLost.

You can easily check status of the newly created conversation by clicking Group ID.

By clicking the Group ID you will see all related conversations. In this example, the newly created conversation has been picked by an agent and it has ended. If the conversation would be in allocation, you would see the status In queue and no agent assigned.

What is Group ID?

Quite often handling a conversation requires help from others in the form of transfers or consultations. In such cases, the group ID collects all relevant conversations under one ID and enables you to see the chain. This applies to all conversation types.