What are instant calls? 

Once you've qualified your website visitors through a chatbot or form, identifying the right people to offer an instant call, they can choose to meet with someone on your team immediately in Google Meet or Zoom. 

This is similar to our live chat feature, except instead of connecting with them by typing in a chat window, back and forth, instead you're meeting them face-to-face in your preferred video conferencing app. This can be an advantage for sales calls and other interactions that benefit from a stronger emotional connection from the start . 

How does it work? 

Similar to live chat, you'll define the days and hours you're available for instant calls within your profile. The same availability is used for both live chat and instant calls. You can also set your availability manually by toggling it on or off in your account.

You can add an instant call action to a chatbot or form, just like any other interaction in the conversation flow. This can be based on how they answer previous questions, using conditional logic to route the appropriate visitors to people in your organization who are best equipped to assist them. 

Figure 1: Add instant call action

You can either have all users take any instant call or create teams for specific profiles of customers. For instance, you may have a specific team for identified VIP prospects and another with specialized knowledge in a specific product or service. 

OnceHub checks to make sure there's someone on the appropriate team available, and that their OnceHub profile is integrated with the relevant video call app. If no one is available with an active connection to the video call app, your conversation flow will not offer your visitor an instant call and will fall back to the next interaction defined in the flow.

What will my users experience on our end? 

When someone accepts your offer of an instant call, you'll see this from within the live chat inbox, if you're currently marked as available. 

Once an agent accepts an instant call, no other agents can take it. The agent accepting it has six seconds to start the meeting. 

Figure 2: Accept call

A new browser tab will open with a generated call link. Be sure ahead of time that your users' browsers don't block new tabs from opening. 

Once they've finished the meeting, the agent must click the 'end meeting' button in their integrated video call app. They will not be able to see and accept new instant call requests until the active call is ended. 

Figure 3: End meeting

How do I make sure my users notice a new instant call? 

Make sure your users enable push notifications in their browser. OnceHub sends push notifications to the browser and also provides visual and audio notification within the OnceHub account, whenever there's a new visitor accepting an instant call offer. 

If you'd like your users to be notified via another app like Google Chat, Slack, or Microsoft Teams, you can configure this using webhooks. When you’re configuring the instant call action in the builder, go to the Webhook notification field and add the webhook URL. We recommend you test it to ensure the connection is successful.