Best Practices for Service Cloud Voice

Factors Affecting Call Price

Call pricing can vary based on several factors, including your telephony provider and service structure. To accurately forecast costs and avoid unexpected charges, consider the factors affecting the call price.

• Per-minute charges
  • Inbound and outbound calls have different per-minute rates. Outbound calls, especially international ones, typically cost more.
  • Inbound calls to toll-free numbers have a higher per-minute charge because the business bears the cost.
  • The per-minute charge varies depending on the type of outbound connection such as landline or mobile connection.
• Regional pricing
  • Call pricing is different for domestic and international calls. Domestic call prices are cheaper than the international call prices. International call prices, especially to certain regions, can be higher.
• Taxes and regulatory fees
  • Call pricing is also affected by regional taxes. Some regions can have telecommunication taxes, universal service fund fees, or regulatory surcharges that increase the overall call price.
  • Additional charges related to compliance with emergency services regulations can apply. For example, E911 increases the call price.
• Surcharges for specific call types
  • Outbound calls to premium rate numbers such as 1-900 numbers, have a higher call price.
  • The call price is different for local and national calls. Depending on the country, local call prices can be lower than national call prices.

Before committing to a Service Cloud Voice license or a telephony partner, review the provider’s pricing policies, especially for any non standard usage you anticipate.

Inbound, Outbound, and Transfer Calls

Review these considerations when working with inbound, outbound, and transfer calls.

• If an agent misses a call, their status automatically changes to offline. To prevent your agents from going offline when they miss a call, set the Update Status on Push Timeout option to Busy in the presence configuration settings. See Presence Configuration Settings.
• If a call transfer fails and Amazon Connect is the telephony provider, check the agent whisper contact flow. For example, if the agent whisper flow tries to play an unsupported audio file type for a prompt or takes too long, the call transfer can fail.
• If you allow users to use a virtual desktop to log in to Service Cloud Voice to handle calls, but your inbound and outbound calls aren’t working as expected, check your setup.
  • If the virtual desktop user doesn’t have the local media page open, voice calls don’t connect even if the agents accept them. The calls are marked as missed and the agent’s status is set to Offline or Busy. An agent can make an outbound call, but the audio can’t connect and the customer doesn’t receive the call.
  • If the virtual desktop user has the local media page open, you can’t mute calls made from a virtual desktop.

Tip Assign the Remote Media for Virtual Desktop user permission only to agents who use virtual desktop to log in to Salesforce.

See Set Up Voice Call Audio for Virtual Desktop Users.

Voice Resiliency

Voice resiliency ensures that the telephony system stays operational when the number of conversations is over the limit or when certain background services are affected. During this period, certain features and functionalities can be impacted.

• If your contact center is set up with Amazon Connect and you've customized the Sample SCV Amazon Connect contact flows, see the Amazon Connect Flows Best Practices page for steps on how to ensure your contact flows are set up to support voice resiliency.
• If your contact center is set up with another partner telephony, see the Add Support for Voice Resiliency page for steps on how to ensure your environment is set to support voice resiliency.

See the Voice Resiliency for Service Cloud Voice knowledge article for more information about voice resiliency.

Call Recording

For training purposes, to ensure compliance, and to collaborate on customer issues, agents can listen to and comment on call recordings. By default, agents in a partner telephony contact center can listen to call recordings. For Amazon Connect contact centers, you have to enable this feature for agents. You can also enable non-agent users to listen to call recordings.

To enable Salesforce and contact center users to listen to call recordings in the Call Audio Player, ensure that they have access to the recordings. If they don't have access, the Call Recording Player in the Service Console doesn’t appear. See Voice Call Recordings.

After Conversation Work

Review these considerations when working with after conversation work (ACW).

• The After Conversation Work component is available only when the call is connected.
• Service channel settings override the presence configuration settings for after conversation work.
• You can modify reports on AgentWork to show AfterConversationActualTime, AcwExtensionCount, and AcwExtensionDuration.

Agent Flag and Whisper

Before attempting to raise a flag or send a whisper message to a supervisor, the agent must be online in the Omni-Channel widget. If the agent is offline, flag raises and whisper messages don’t work.

Phone Number Format

Don’t use ambiguous or invalid phone number formats when you dial phone numbers or link phone numbers from inbound calls. Ambiguous or invalid phone number formats can prevent Salesforce from locating records, such as contact records that are associated with the phone number.

For Service Cloud Voice with Partner Telephony, ask your telephony provider which phone number formats they support.

For an Amazon Connect contact center, use country codes when dialing phone numbers or linking phone numbers from inbound calls. If an E.164 country code isn’t provided, Salesforce appends the country code specified in the call center settings. The lack of a country code can prevent Salesforce from locating records, such as contact records that are associated with the phone number.

Add Callers and Transfer Calls

If Amazon Connect is your telephony provider and contacts are missing when you try to add a caller, open Amazon Connect. Then verify that the contacts are added to the Quick Connect and that the Quick Connects are added to the queue.

See Add Callers or Transfer Calls and Amazon Documentation: Create Quick Connects.

Command Center for Service

If the Assign Agents button under the Queues Backlog tab of Command Center for Service is missing, verify that you performed these steps.

• Under Supervisor Settings, verify that Queues and skills is selected. See Enable Supervisors to Change Agent Queues.
• Assign the Contact Center Supervisor permission set to all supervisors. System admins don’t need to be assigned this permission set. They can use the Assign Agents button in Command Center for Service to change queue membership for Voice and nonvoice agents without any additional permissions.
• Assign each supervisor to a supervisor configuration. You can use supervisor configurations to reduce the number of agents that a supervisor oversees.

Sandboxes

• If Voice is set up in a sandbox, only do a partial copy sandbox refresh. If you do a full refresh, you have to set up Voice again. See Refresh Your Sandbox.

• When Service Cloud Voice and Conversation Insights are turned on in a production org, copying the production org to a sandbox turns off Conversation Insights. It also breaks the flow of data to the Service Cloud Voice CRM Analytics app. To restore the data flow, turn on Conversation Insights in the sandbox.

Voice Call Automation

Don’t modify the OwnerId field on VoiceCall records through custom automation during the call routing lifecycle. Modifying this field through custom automation, such as record-triggered flows or Apex triggers, during an active call routing operation can cause call routing failures.

During the call routing lifecycle, Service Cloud Voice manages the Owner field (OwnerId) on VoiceCall records to coordinate call assignment and access permissions. Ownership is transferred when a rep accepts the call, not when the call is first offered. Although customer automation can edit the Owner field on orgs with Salesforce Voice enabled, modifying it during active call routing creates conflicts with the platform's internal logic.

Other fields that the platform uses during call routing, such as User (UserId), Vendor Call Key (VendorCallKey), Call Type (CallType), and Call Center (CallCenterId), are protected at the platform level and can’t be modified by customer automation.

If your reps experience intermittent call routing failures, especially on rerouted calls where the first rep didn't answer, check for:

• Record-triggered flows on VoiceCall: From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter Flows, and filter for flows that trigger on the VoiceCall object. Look for any that modify the Owner field.
• Apex triggers on VoiceCall: Check for before update triggers that modify the OwnerId field.

If you find automation that modifies the Owner or OwnerId field, modify it to stop overriding the Owner field.