Troubleshooting

Symptoms below are written as the caller would describe them, because that is how they get reported to you.

The agent talks over me and will not stop

The most disorienting failure, and the least obvious. The caller says almost nothing while the agent holds a rapid conversation with itself.

Nothing here is broken in the usual sense. Every stage does its job correctly on audio that should never have been treated as the caller.

What it means. The agent is hearing itself. Almost always a speakerphone, a car, or a laptop with speakers and no headset.

What to do. Raise echo suppression on the Voice tab. Note the trade-off: while it is active the caller cannot interrupt the agent mid-sentence. On a line that real callers reach from cars and kitchens, that is the right trade.

The greeting is in a different voice from the rest of the call

What it means. The greeting was already recorded in the previous voice and was played before the rest of the call resolved the new one.

What to do. Re-record the phrases for the language you changed. If it happens on the very first call after a voice change and never again, that is the old recording being used once. If it happens on every call, the phrases for that language were never re-recorded after the change.

The greeting is not the one I wrote

What it means. Almost always one of two things: the phrase is still in draft, or voice is not enabled for the app.

What to do. Check that the greeting is published, and that voice is switched on. Authoring a phrase and enabling voice are separate steps on purpose, so you can prepare a configuration without exposing it, and the cost of that is remembering to do the second one.

The first caller of the day waits, then it is fine

What it means. The phrases had not been recorded yet, so the first call that needed one paid for making it.

What to do. Warm the phrases after any change to a phrase, a voice or a language. It is the step with no visible result when you do it and an obvious one when you skip it.

The call connects, then apologises and hangs up

What it means. Something failed after the line was answered. The caller gets a polite message rather than silence, which is deliberate, but it is always a real fault.

What to do. Find the call in the log and check whether it has a transcript. A call with no transcript at all failed before the agent ever spoke; a call that has a greeting and nothing after it failed on the first turn. If this is happening on every call rather than occasionally, treat it as an outage and raise it rather than adjusting settings.

The agent asks how it can help, over and over

What it means. The agent is not carrying the conversation forward, so every turn looks like the beginning of the call.

What to do. This is not a phrase problem and editing the greeting will not fix it. Check the call log: if the agent also forgets a name the caller gave a moment earlier, or loses a booking halfway through, it is the same underlying issue and worth raising rather than tuning.

The agent answers in the wrong language

What it means. Either the language order is not what you think, or the agent is answering in whichever language the caller used.

What to do. Set the language you want answers in explicitly. Keep the recognizer listening for every language your callers actually use, including the one you do not answer in. Callers mix languages inside a single sentence, and a recognizer restricted to one turns the mixed words into nonsense before the agent ever sees them.

Callers hang up during the greeting

What it means. Usually the greeting is too long, and occasionally it sounds like a recorded menu.

What to do. Cut it to under about ten seconds and make sure it ends with a question. See writing a greeting.

Words get cut off at the end of sentences

What it means. The agent decided the caller had finished before they actually had, or the outbound audio is stalling mid-phrase.

What to do. If the caller’s words are truncated, they are being cut off while speaking. If the agent’s own speech stutters or drops syllables, raise the pacing lead.

The call went fine but never appeared in the log

What it means. The call reached the caller, the carrier and usually the recording, and only the record failed to write. Nothing on the call itself shows it.

What to do. Confirm against your carrier’s own call history, then see recovering lost calls. The calls and their audio can be rebuilt; the transcript and the analysis cannot.

Reproduce it before you change anything

Voice problems are extremely condition-dependent. The same agent can be flawless on a headset in a quiet room and unusable on a speakerphone in a car. Before changing a setting, place a call that reproduces the complaint, on the kind of device and connection the caller used. Otherwise you are tuning against a line that was already working.