Building a Standard Automated Reach Schedule
The following tutorial will provide instructions on how to populate an on-call schedule for a Standard Automated Reach. With a reach, we will disconnect the caller and then our system will begin to reach out to your on-call staff list.
During programming, your staff list and schedule may have been added. But if you haven't already added your schedule, please see our tutorials for Adding your Staff Members and Adding an On Call Schedule. You will also need to configure a Reach Message before you can create a Reach schedule.
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to:
After your staff members and schedule type have been added, click the yellow Schedule button to the right of the Expiring column to build out your dates.
At the top of the next screen, you'll see the Schedule expires status, you'll see the Start / Stop Time (Schedule runs from), the Timezone, and the schedule Type that you selected during setup. Just below the grey bar, you'll see Set the schedule for followed by the name of the schedule you are editing.
Selecting Dates to Schedule
Under the schedule name, you will enter the active dates that you'll be building out.
∞: If you are building a schedule that will never change, you can retain the default ∞ (Infinity) option on the left. Creating the schedule using this option will infinitely populate calendar dates with the staff members you select.
We're building this example as an Infinity schedule, but there are a few other options for selecting dates. Learn more about them here.
Adjusting Contact Settings
Next, you'll determine the Contact settings. This includes the Reach format, the number of times we will dial through your list, the number of minutes between each call and the employees and phone numbers we will contact.
1. To the right of Reach, you will see a drop down menu with the options Standard or Custom. In a Standard schedule, the same person or group of people is on-call for the full 24-hour period from the Start time to the Stop time. In a Custom schedule, there are different people on-call during separate blocks of time within the 24-hour period. For this tutorial, you will select Standard reach.
2. At this point, we will Add the specific staff members who will be contacted during your scheduled dates.You will see 2 column headers: Staff and Telephone number. (If you need to enter additional staff before continuing, click on the blue Return to on-call link in the top left corner of the page.)
Select the first person we will reach out to from the Staff column along with the corresponding number from the Telephone number column.
Reach schedules can have a maximum of 10 dial-outs.
3. Once you have set all fields, the yellow Add to reach schedule button on the right will be operational. Click it to add the staff member. Follow the same steps to include additional staff members, if necessary.
5. Next, you'll select the type of reach. Type tells our operators how many times to loop through your on-call list. For example, if we were to call through your list 5 times, you would choose 5x + End.
Note that our system can reach out to your staff for a maximum of 10 calls. This means that the number of staff members in your list combined with your Type cannot exceed 10 dial-outs. For example:
- If you have 2 people in your list, your Type cannot exceed 5x + End.
- If you have 10 people in your list, your type cannot exceed 1x + End.
6. Then, use the Queue drop down to select the number of minutes the system will wait between each dial-out call. For example, setting this time to 10 minutes means our system will wait 10 minutes between each reach attempt.
Edit a Staff Entry
Changing Drop Down Values
1. Now that you've adjusted your staff list, the blue Edit button to the right of the entries will become operable.
2. Click Edit to make any changes. In Edit mode, the entry will be highlighted in yellow, and a Save button will appear on the right. Use the drop down lists to update each entry. After updating an entry, click the Save button on the right side of the highlighted line.
Moving an Entry
If you would like to change the order of the dial-outs, hover over the green crosshairs to the left of the staff member column. Right click to drag the entry up or down in the list.
Deleting an Entry
You can also delete an entry by clicking the red X button to the far right of the line item.
Save a Schedule
1. When your changes are complete, click the blue Save schedule button in the bottom right corner of the last entry.
Note that because Infinity is the default setting for scheduling, when trying to save an Infinity schedule, the system will confirm that this is what you want before saving. Click Yes to confirm.
2. Then, scroll down to the full calendar where you'll see the dates you scheduled displayed in the color you selected.
Repeat the string of steps above to continue adding to your schedule. Once you've built out your dates, the Schedule expires status at the top left of the page will change to the last date you have scheduled.
NOTE: If you are scheduling for a future date or time, the expiry status will remain Expired until that date.
Now that you have created your reach on-call schedule, please read How to Integrate a Reach Schedule into Your Script to complete the on-call setup.
Have questions? Feel free to contact our Customer Service department or submit a support ticket.