Schedule customer callbacks across time zones
"Call me tomorrow at eleven" means eleven in Chennai, not in Dubai. How an outbound queue keeps promises across time zones, and when it stops.
For a Dubai trader serving customers in India, Africa, Central Asia and Europe, “call me tomorrow at eleven” needs a time zone as well as a date. Recording the customer’s local time helps the team schedule the callback correctly and avoid repeated manual conversions.
Every card has a clock
Terramine Desk puts the customer's local time on every card, taken from their address or, when there is no address, from the country code of their phone. Every time on screen says which time zone applies, ours or theirs, so nobody has to do the arithmetic in their head before picking up the phone.
Only inside their working day
The outbound queue rings only between 08:00 and 18:00 where the customer is, with a short grace period for a call that is owed. A callback promised for a particular time is booked at that time on their clock; one promised without a time goes in at ten in the morning, theirs. The time the customer named on the call is taken from the call summary itself, so nobody has to type it in.
The retry schedule
A retry schedule balances follow-up with a clear stopping point. Terramine Desk provides the following default sequence; your team can adjust retry rules for the workflow:
- No answer: try again ten minutes later, and ten minutes after that.
- Still nothing: call at nine the next morning, their time.
- Once more an hour later.
- Then stop: the lead moves to Contact not working, and a person decides what happens next.
A dial the network could not place is not a no-answer and does not count as an attempt. After three such failures in a row, your team is told, because that's a problem with the line, not with the customer.
Control from the board
A salesperson can move a lead to the front of the queue, call it next, or call it off, from the lead's card. When the agent will not ring a lead, the card says why: outside their hours, on the do-not-call list, or waiting for its next scheduled attempt.
Where it does not call
Do-not-call is checked by the server before every dial, for the company and for the person, not by somebody remembering. Outside your office hours the queue waits, and a person pressing Dial after hours is asked to confirm first.
A requested callback should have a clear time, owner and record.
What to measure
- Callbacks made at the hour promised, as a share of callbacks promised.
- Leads that reached Contact not working, and why.
- Calls placed outside a customer's working day: the answer should be none.
After hours
When your office closes, the queue stops dialling and follow-up emails are held until the morning. A customer who calls in meanwhile hears your answering message in the agent's voice, and up to two minutes of what they say is recorded, transcribed and summarised like any other call, so it is on Terramine Desk when your team walks in.
The systems: TERRA-106 DIAL, TERRA-407 CLOCK, TERRA-408 DNC and TERRA-105 HOURS.
When does the AI call a customer?
Between 08:00 and 18:00 in the customer's own time zone, and at the hour they named for a callback.
How many times does it retry?
Twice ten minutes apart, then at 09:00 the next morning their time and an hour later; then a person decides.
How does it know the customer's time zone?
From the address on the card, or from the phone number's country code when there is no address.
TERRA-106 · DIALTERRA-407 · CLOCKTERRA-408 · DNCTERRA-105 · HOURS