Outbound automation

Outbound automation calls a list of people and hands each answered call to a bot. The bot handles the conversation, whether it confirms an appointment, runs a survey, or follows up a renewal. Live Hub places the calls. It decides when to call and at what rate, decides what to do when nobody answers, and records what happened to each number.

A campaign is that list together with the rules around it. You create the campaign, add its targets, and unlock it. From then on Live Hub works through the list inside the hours you set, retrying failures and recording the outcome of every call.

Live Hub manages the following for each campaign:

• Scheduling. A campaign runs within a date range, a daily time window and a chosen set of weekdays, all read in the campaign's own time zone.
• Pacing. Limits on calls per second and concurrent calls keep a campaign from flooding your account or the far end.
• Retries. You set how many times to try a number again, and how long to leave between attempts.
• Fax and answering machines. Live Hub detects them and either hangs up or passes the call to the bot anyway.
• Results. Each target carries its own status, failure reason and call statistics, together with anything the bot reports back.

If your own application decides who to call and when, use Outbound calling instead.

Before you start

Outbound automation has the following requirements and limits:

• Your account needs an Essential plan. See Account plans.
• Your account needs an API client. If you do not have one, add an API client in Access control (IAM).
• Each bot a campaign calls with needs outbound calling enabled.
• Your account has a limit on how many campaigns can be active at once, and on how many targets a campaign can hold. Live Hub tells you when you reach either one.

Create and run campaigns

• Create a campaign — set the schedule, the call rate and what happens when a call fails
• Manage targets — add the people to call, one at a time or from a .csv file
• Run and monitor campaigns — lock and unlock a campaign, and read its statistics
• Manage campaigns — change a campaign's settings, or delete it

You can also do every task in this section through the REST API.