Introduction
One of the benefits of the Talkative Voice AI bot is that unlike human agents, it can be available 24/7 - however, most queues it will eventually transfer too will have business hours which should be considered. If you need to prevent transfers to queues unless they are within business hours, you can do this using the business hour tool.
Configuration
The transfer destinations we use are arbitrary extensions, and unlike chat these extensions are not mapped to a queue, therefore, we reference a business hour preset directly instead of via a queue.
Setting your Business Hours
You can use your default business hours, or if you require a specific preset for Voice AI you can do so with our presets. You can follow the standard business hour guide here.
Adding a Business Hour Tool
In the tools menu of your voice AI bot, you can now add a Business Hours Tool:
The tool includes a name, a description and the business hour preset you wish to use.
You may create multiple business hour tools to report for different presets.
The Voice AI Tool system will recognize the need to call other tools in order to satisfy the requirements of a single tool. For example, in the transfer tool, you can mention that it can only be transferred to if they are within business hours for an emergency appointment. The tool won't run until it is first checked to see if it has another tool that can satisfy the requirement. If it can, it will call the tool and then use the information provided by that tool to determine if the transfer tool can be called.
Example Business Hour Workflow
In this example, we'll be talking about the Talkative Health Centre. Talkative Health Centre allows you to ring up and book an appointment. There are two types of appointments you may book:
- An Emergency Same-day Appointment, for which you'll have to ring before midday to make an appointment for the same day.
- A Routine Appointment. You can ring before 5 pm to make an appointment for another day.
For the Voice AI solution, we will need two business-hour tools:
- For the Emergency Same-day Appointment business hours
- For the Routine Appointment business hours
Then we will need a transfer tool with two destinations:
- For routine appointments
- For Emergency Same-day Appointments
The business hour tool for emergency business appointments will be configured with a prompt such as this:
and the routine appointments like this:
If you note in these two tools, we don't talk about when it can be used or that it should use it when trying to handle transfers. We just tell it what it can use the tool for.
Now the transfer destinations for the emergency appointment will look like this:
and the routine appointments will look like this:
If you note in the prompt for both these destinations, we tell it what the queue is for: routine appointments and emergency appointments. It can use this to semantically match the business hour naming, which follows the same paradigm. It has instructions to check the business hours for routine appointments or emergency appointments before you transfer, and if they're outside the business hours, you cannot transfer.
The content of the main prompt will be mainly to drive the behavior and try and force a particular flow. You don't necessarily need to have anything in your main prompt for this to work. The tools themselves will handle the requirement to check the business hours, but you might provide some more context in the main prompt. Like in our example, we've told them if the emergency appointment line is closed, you should inform the caller to ring NHS 111 instead for an out-of-hours emergency appointment.
The subsequent interaction flow will look like this:
Auto Attendants & Talkative Directory Tool
Whilst this pattern works very well for queues that have a limited number of extensions and a limited set of business hours, you may find benefit in either creating your own bespoke business hour lookup and directory tool or considering using the Talkative Directory tool.
The Talkative Directory is a pro services tool which allows you to create a directory of extensions and assign a business hour preset to each entry in the directory. This tool then allows the bot to make a request to the tool to find any matching extension within business hours. The bot then uses the extensions that are returned to make a transfer. The benefit of this tool is that it allows you to create a large directory of extensions and have them mapped to individual directory numbers. It also means the bot is unaware of any directory extensions unless the tool returns them reducing the risk of being transferred to an incorrect or invalid extension
The Talkative Directory tool is a pro service delivered tool and may require commercial engagement before you are able to use it. If you are interested in using the tool and would like to join one of the demos, please get in contact with your customer success manager to arrange this.
Which tool should I use?
We recommend always starting with the Talkative business hour built-in tool within the Voice AI Bot itself. This is the simplest and quickest way to get started and will satisfy 90% of use cases.
Only once you've tried the built-in voice business hour tool would we recommend looking at pro service options, including the directory tool.