Twilio Flex Voice Mail to Unavailable

Question

We have set-up our Flex, and stuck on one of the last steps. We are a small office, and have a main number that clients call us on. If they ask for a specific employee, more importantly, if the specific employee is required to answer the client issue, and they are marked UNAVAILABLE, it doesn't appear we have access to send the call to voicemail (the transfer button is grayed out).

Is there a work around? A way to direct call the VM? Do we need to tweak our flow? If not, it appears we need to be logged in 24/7 to have access to VM's. A fairly inefficient and expensive option.

Answer 1

OK, I think I know what the issue is. A call comes through to one agent in Flex, but they need to transfer it to the other agent. If the other agent is also available, they can transfer the call no problem. If the other agent is not available, you would like to transfer the call to that agent's voicemail, but there's no way to do that right now.

The issue is that Flex is built around available agents and doesn't have voicemail built in. You've added voicemail as part of the Studio Flow, but this is not integrated to the Flex interface at all.

I would solve this with a Flex plugin that does a couple of things:

• Add a button to the agent transfer list for unavailable agents to send to their voicemail.
• That button would trigger a request to a Twilio Function, sending it the Call's Sid and the agent you want to transfer to.
• The Function could then use the calls API to update the call, redirecting it to the existing voicemail handlers that you have for your agents.

I'm afraid I don't have example code for this plugin, but there is great documentation on building Flex plugins that you can follow to get up to speed.