Customers and agents are not always located in the same time zone. Being in different time zones can result in agents calling customers at inconvenient or antisocial times. The permissible call times feature in Connect eliminates this problem. A Dial List's permissible call times describe the time window in which agents can make calls within the list. Outside of the time window, the agent cannot retrieve pending calls from the list and so can make no calls from this list.
Supervisors define the time window in the Time Zone, Start Time and End Time fields in the Create New Dial List page, or in the Dial List Detail section in an existing Dial List. The time zone should usually match the time zone of the pending calls relating to the Dial List.
Connect automatically adjusts for daylight saving time changes. This applies to all time zones supported by Salesforce, see Salesforce help for full list.
By default both time fields are set to 00:00 and time zone is GMT. When both fields are 00:00, the Dial List has no time limitation. Agents can retrieve pending calls from the list at any time. If a field is empty, the field's time defaults to 00:00. When Start Time is greater than End Time then the time window overlaps two days.
Examples
| Permissible call time | Description |
|---|---|
| Start Time 12:00, End Time 20:00 | Dial List is active for 8 hours between 12:00 and 20:00 |
| Start Time 16:30, End Time 04:15 | Dial List is active for 11 hours and 45 min and goes into the next day |
Use case
An organization has customers located in Sydney and Perth. Sydney and Perth are in different time zones: Sydney is in New South Wales, GMT +10:00, and Perth is in Western Australia, GMT +8:00. The organization wants agents to make calls to those customers between 10 am and 6 pm in the customers' local time.
To achieve this the supervisor must create two Dial Lists. The first list contains calls for customers in New South Wales, and the second contains calls for customers in Western Australia. The supervisor must define the following permissible call times and time zones either when creating the lists or by editing the list:
| Customer location | Start Time | End Time | Time Zone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sydney | 10:00 | 18:00 | Australia/Sydney |
| Perth | 10:00 | 18:00 | Australia/Perth |
The supervisor can assign agents in different locations to the lists. Regardless of the agents' locations, the agents can only make calls to customers within the customers permissible call times.
For information about defining permissible call times in Dial Lists, see Creating a single Dial List, Creating multiple individual Dial Lists for agents or Editing a Dial List.