Taking a phone call
What this is, and what it is not
Aiku does not make the call. There is no dialler, no number to ring, nothing happens to your handset. What Aiku records is the plain fact that you are on the telephone right now, which it has no other way of knowing.
That matters because of what it explains. A customer writes in, nobody answers for twenty minutes, and the shop looks neglected. If those twenty minutes were a phone call, the inbox now says so, in front of everybody, without you having to explain yourself afterwards.
Starting a call
Open Chat → Inbox and press the Phone button at the top right, beside the settings cog. A window opens with one thing in it: Start Phone Call.
Press it when you actually pick up the handset. The timer starts at that moment, not when you finish filling anything in - there is nothing to fill in yet. Only then does the window ask who you are speaking to.
If you work more than one shop, the call is filed against the one you have open in the Inbox. You can change it in the window, before or after you start, and changing it clears whatever contact you had chosen, because a customer of one shop is not a customer of another.
While you are on it
A green bar sits at the top of the screen with the timer running, on every page in Aiku, not only in Chat. Click it to come back to the call. It is there because the one thing that ends a call is somebody remembering they are on one.
The timer is kept on the server, not in your browser. Reload the page, close the tab, come back on a different computer - it is still running and still says the right number of minutes.
You are handed no new conversations. For as long as the call runs you are out of the rota: waiting chats go to colleagues who are at their keyboards. The conversations already in your hands stay yours - nothing is taken away from you and given to somebody else.
Filing the call
When you hang up, open the call again and fill in three things.
Who you spoke to. Customer searches the customers of the shop the call is filed against. Guest lets you pick somebody who has written into the chat before, or type a name yourself, or leave it blank when the name is not worth recording.
What came out of it. This is required, and it is the whole point. Write what they asked, what you agreed and what happens next - the next agent reads this and nothing else. End call stays greyed out until there is something in the box.
Press End call and it is done. The length of the call is kept, the notes go on the record, and you are back in the rota for new chats.
If you started it by mistake
Cancel call throws the call away: no notes, no minutes, nothing on anybody's conversation. It asks you to confirm first, because the button sits next to the one that files the call properly and a slip of the mouse should not lose a real conversation.
A cancelled call is kept in the list, marked as cancelled and with no length against it. It never counts as time spent on the phone.
If you forget to end it
After 60 minutes Aiku closes the call by itself and marks it Closed automatically. It has to: somebody who went home on a running call would be out of the chat rota all night while the queue piled up on their colleagues.
Ten minutes before that, the bar at the top turns amber and warns you once. A call closed automatically keeps no length and carries no notes, because nobody knows how long the call really was or what was said on it. It is a gap in the record, not a record - end your calls properly and it never happens.
What your colleagues see
In the Inbox rail. Each shop's grid has a telephone column beside the website, email and WhatsApp ones. A pulsing dot on its heading means somebody is on a call for that shop right now; the numbers in the two rows are the calls finished today, split into customer and guest. Clicking the column opens the full list for that shop.
A call in progress is deliberately not counted in either row. Who was on the other end is only decided when the call is filed, so until then it belongs to neither.
In the messaging rail. A small telephone appears beside the name of anybody currently on a call, so before you ask a colleague something you can see they are mid-conversation with somebody else.
In supervision. The list of agents down the side of the supervision screen marks whoever is on a call, next to how many conversations they are holding.
On the customer's conversation
When a call is filed against a customer or a guest who has an ongoing conversation, the notes are written into that conversation's thread, where they sit in order alongside the messages, with who made the call and how long it took.
This is the part that survives. Six weeks later, when somebody opens that conversation and wonders why the customer suddenly stopped asking, the answer is there: they were phoned, and here is what was agreed. A contact with no conversation on record still gets the call kept in the list - there is simply nowhere to put it in a thread.
The phone calls list
Chat → Phone calls, in a shop, in an organisation or across the group. Every call with when it started, who made it, who they spoke to, how long it took, its status and the notes in full. Search runs over the agent's name, the contact and the notes; the status filter separates completed calls from cancelled and automatically closed ones.
Calls that were cancelled or closed automatically show a dash instead of a length, so no total of time spent on the phone can be inflated by minutes nobody actually spent talking.
Who can read what. On a shop's page, whoever may see that shop's chat sees its calls. On the organisation and group pages you see the calls of the shops you work, plus your own; supervisors, organisation admins and anybody with the group overview see all of them. Notes about a customer are not general reading.