Handling calls in Nimbus leverages MS Teams call features in both Inbound Service Calls and Outbound Call direction. The main difference is that Nimbus is establishing a Conference between you as Team Member (also called Nimbus "Users") and the calling Customer. By inviting a Nimbus bot into Teams conferences Reporting metrics can be tracked in the background and additional participants can be managed in a Conference. To achieve this the Nimbus bot uses Nimbus App Permissions which are usually delegated by an Administrator.
Primary views
As a Service User (Team Member) you can focus on your personal call experience in Nimbus. Within the UI you can steer your Service availability, access reporting features and handle tasks, as explained further below on this page.
To keep your experience as simple as possible, Nimbus has a reduced set of "daily-driver" views, such as:
- My Overview to check your incoming tasks and daily metrics.
- My Sessions to handle your incoming calls and related After-Call Work (ACW).
- Attendant Console – in cases where you act as a front desk operator for call forwarding and consultation.
Call Monitoring and Distribution
As a Service owner you may be more interested in monitoring your team and adjusting your Service parameters as needed. Therefore, your daily call-handling focus should be on the following areas:
- Services Overview to quickly see the incoming load of incoming calls, compared to the availability of your Service Team(s).
- Live View to quickly check on individual Services and their daily KPI trends.
- Personal Dashboards to monitor and supervise specific Services or Users.
- Configuration and Service Settings to optimize the call distribution parameters within your Services.
Learn more about this…
As Service Owner you also want to steer the channels of communication, via specific Workflows that contain Workflow Activities for further customization. Applying these settings is done via the Modalities Service Settings
Nimbus also considers individual User presence status (as set in MS Teams) prior to distributing calls. This allows to even include Users that are - for example - set to "Away" or "Busy". This can be configured in the Distribution Service Settings.
🔍You can also visit and learn more on the User States and Task Queue and Distribution pages.
Handling Incoming calls
While handling calls in Nimbus:
INC Nimbus and MS Teams native functionality
☝ While handling Nimbus tasks, avoid MS Teams-native call controls
During an ongoing session, Nimbus cannot control any functionality engaged in parallel via MS-Teams
(e.g. putting Callers On-Hold, Transfers, adding participants to a Session, Muting of participants).
✅While handling Nimbus tasks:
- Instruct all Service Users NOT to mix the approach between Nimbus and MS Teams.
-
Prefer the available Nimbus UI options for any call handling and -transfer scenarios:
e.g. Attendant Console (Safe/Blind transfer, Consultation call), Hold and Retrieve, Parking.
🤔What are the effects of using MS-Teams in parallel?
When using MS-Teams functionality in parallel during a Nimbus Session, the User / Customer experience cannot be clearly guided or monitored by Nimbus anymore.
Possible effects are:
- Customers may not get clear feedback on certain actions (e.g. no On-Hold Music - just silence).
- Manually added participants in a call conference may not all hear each other as intended.
- The status in Nimbus UIs may not reflect the actual state of a Session anymore.
- Call metrics, KPI and Nimbus Reporting results may not be properly recorded.
Nimbus is designed to not obstruct your daily call handling operation with Microsoft Teams. Most interactions rely on basic MS Teams functionality wherever possible, while extending functionality with rich context and call-related work. Let's explore the typical steps in the following chapters:
Call Distribution
- The Customer locates and calls your Service (discoverable either via Teams search, configured PSTN Number or known SIP Address as configured in the General Service Settings.
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Nimbus handles the call according to your Workflow configuration. The call is added to a task queue and distributed according to the parameters specified in the workflow "Queue" Activities1.
💡In this example we continue with a "Pickup" type distribution2.
🔍Learn more by reading Distribution Types. -
Nimbus now will show the call in its UI, within multiple views wherever relevant to the involved Service Users. For example…
- … in the “Tasks Widget” in the Dashboard,
- … the Live View or …
- … My Sessions for the Users that actually get the call distributed to them.
1 When enabled in your “Queue” activity, an Adaptive Card chat message will also be sent to your chat channel in MS Teams. All current "Active" Nimbus Users are mentioned individually to be notified of this incoming call.
2 Even while being set "Active" for the respective Nimbus team, Users might still see inactive "Pickup" controls. This is determined by Service Settings > "Conversations Distribution", which defines that Users in "Away" or "Busy" state are also considered for call distribution.
Call Establishment
💡 In this example below we continue with Adaptive Cards enabled as a better visual example.
- Let us assume that a User in your team chooses to accept the call by clicking "Pickup"
🔍 This can be done either in the Dashboard, or the "My Overview" area in the Nimbus Personal App.
💡 The Adaptive Card also offers "Pickup" controls.
- Once "Pickup" is clicked Nimbus will establish a session between Caller and Agent
⮑ The User will get a regular MS Teams incoming call (in the name of the Service).
⮑ Nimbus will remain in control of the session for gathering Reporting KPI metrics. - Eventually, Agent and Caller decide to end the call
⮑ The Nimbus bot remains until both parties have left the call, then concludes the session.
⮑ In the background, a Nimbus Reporting session is concluded.
Call Conclusion
At the end, the call information will be gathered and reported, for example as Statistics and within the Sessions List.
The will also be updated with the Live View, as the Status of the User becomes “Available” again after handling the task.
The Adaptive Cards in your team's chat channel will also update with information about who / when / and if the call was handled.
Duty States & Responsibility Profiles
💡The following content is taken from the Duty States page.
Duty States
Duty States are the Nimbus way to signal if you are on or off duty. As part of Responsibility Profiles, they add an extra layer of conditional availability.
🔍 Using Assistant all Contact Center users can switch their duty state – and underlying responsibility – at any time. This can be done to adapt to various situations such as:
- Requirements for certain Skills and Responsibilities - e.g. when more experts are needed to bolster the usual service after a large technical change.
- Based on workload - Switching to a "highly-available" profile to take more calls from multiple services.
- Based on off days - e.g. Switching to a low-responsible mode, during absence or when abroad.
- Based on work situation - Switching between on-duty and off-duty profiles, e.g. when on a business trip.
Contact Center Service Type feature Enabling this feature will show Assistant with a main menu with a duty state / responsibility profile selector. These profiles are defined by your service administrator.
PREREQUISITES
Users of this feature must be part of a Contact Center service and also Contact Center licensed themselves.
→ Contact Center Assistant icon becomes visible in your main menu.
OPTIONALLY, any Administrator can then do the following:
- Create and assign one or several Responsibility Profiles to your user. These will be visible as additional entries in both Assistant standalone App and Nimbus UI.
-
Any admin can also define Skills and Responsibilities on your user account and define them per responsibility profile.
💡 Note that these skills are not visible to you, but can be adjusted by your team administrator via Agent Service Settings.
💡 Note: Regardless of Contact Center Duty State, you can remain fully "Available" to handle calls from other (non Contact Center) services. Read more on this in the chapter below.
Switching Between Your Duty States
- Login to the Nimbus Frontend portal.
- Note the new main menu item named "Contact Center Assistant" in the main menu.
- Click on it to change your duty status (and thus the related responsibility profile) at any given time.
STATUS PERSISTENCE
- Note that naming and amount of entries may change at any time, as managed and saved by any Nimbus administrator.
- Your status persists even when restarting your MS Teams client or logging out and back into Nimbus.
- You keep the last selected status until you either switch to a different one – or until an Admin changes the setting on your user.
Duty State in Responsibility Profiles
When you create a new Responsibility Profile in Configuration > Responsibility Profiles, you can decide whether it's an on-duty or off-duty profile. By default, responsibility profiles are on-duty profiles. You can change that by switching the Duty toggle.
💡 Note that you can only set the duty state of a responsibility profile as a part of the creation process.
The duty state of responsibility profiles is shown in the list:
When assigning a profile to the user, the duty state of their profile (on duty / off duty) is shown in various Nimbus areas, e.g.:
- … on User listings in the Administration.
- …in Assistant
- …on Non-Personal Dashboards
GOOD TO KNOW
Custom off-duty profiles are treated the same way as the system's default Off Duty profile, meaning that
- … they are tracked accordingly in User States.
- … if the user has a custom off-duty profile assigned, they are into taken into consideration for skill-based routing.
- … the current off-duty profile is outlined on the frontend.
Duty State Effects on Service Availability
Toggling your duty state affects a small colored indicator icon next to the menu entry.
The icon colors indicate your availability as follows:
| Icon color | Service availability condition | Related Responsibility Profile & Duty status notes |
|---|---|---|
| Gray Icon |
Shown when you put yourself off duty via the Contact Center Assistant menu:
|
Off Duty 💡 Note that your "Off Duty" Responsibility Profile can appear under a different name as administrators can change it. |
| Green Icon |
Shown when you put yourself on duty via the Contact Center Assistant menu. You will be selected for tasks when:
|
On Duty (Available) 💡 Note that multiple Responsibility Profiles can be of type "On Duty", but call distribution to you varies by Skills and Responsibilities behind each profile. 🔍 Also see "Status Dependency" infos below. |
| Red Icon |
Shown when you put yourself on duty via the Contact Center Assistant menu, but:
|
On duty (but not Available) - 🔍 More infos on this below. 🔍 Also see "Status Dependency" infos below. |
STATUS DEPENDENCIES
Switching your Duty Profile will not affect your MS Teams presence status and vice-versa. As a result you can still remain "Available ( green) " in MS Teams – e.g. to take internal calls – but appear (Red) in your duty profile, effectively blocking Contact Center related service-tasks.
- Toggling between Responsibility Profiles (Duty States) affects call distribution based on your Skills and Responsibilities. You can learn more about how this algorithm works on the Distribution Order page.
- If you are part of other (non-skill-based) services you may continue to use the "Active" on/off toggle e.g. in Services Overview at any time.💡 Note that this toggle is not present on skill-based services.
Status Q&A and Troubleshooting
🤔 Why is service participation reflected differently in the UI?
- For MS-Teams based services, Nimbus distributes calls evenly among "Active" users, usually to the user "Longest Available" in MS Teams.
- In a Contact Center scenario, Responsibility Profiles allow for much finer control over availabilty. Your duty status changes reflect on all Contact Center services simultaneously, e.g. by making you a first or second-level responder based on your profile and skillset.
- In both scenarios your status doesn't just reflect MS Teams presence, but various other User States.
🤔 Why are my "Active On/Off" toggle controls disabled?
- Note that each service owner can opt out of this feature via User Service Settings by unchecking "Team member can change active state". This can be done individually per service.
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🤔 Are wrong calls getting distributed to you?
- Talk to your service administrator to have a look at your user skills via the Agent Service Settings . Also check if the Distribution Policy of that service matches Skills and Responsibilities set on your user account.
- Users who never signed in to teams will have the Presence “Unknown” set until their first sign-in. To avoid erroneous call distribution we suggest, that Administrators assign an "Off Duty" Responsibility Profiles profile as the initial default.
🤔 Is your status "Red" although you are ready for new tasks?
- Check if your User State is considered "selectable" as per Distribution Service Settings (e.g. Available when Busy / Away) and other flags such as RONA aren't blocking you from getting new tasks.
💡 Rule of thumb: Nimbus will distribute calls only when all "selectable" criteria are met: MS Teams Presence > Not blocked by calls > In a Duty Profile > Not status-flagged by ACW or RONA
Show me how to check this...
🔍About User States:
User States
For its Reporting Model, Nimbus distinguishes sessions by various user state factors: Teams Presence, Duty State, Task Selectability, and User Status flags. A change in either factor has influence on the others, either in being a requirement or in a co-dependency.
| Factor | Precondition(s) | Tracked User State relevant to Nimbus | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teams Layer | ||||||||
| Presence in MS Teams |
✅ Online – including status "Busy" or "Away" (individually defined per Distribution Service Settings) |
Online MS-Teams based services will distribute when "Active". |
Online and set "Active" in Nimbus MS-Teams based services will distribute. |
Online but Busy/Away in Teams and set "Active" in Nimbus Conditional: Determined per each service's Distribution Service Settings aser can either be selectable ↓ or not. |
||||
| Nimbus Layer | ||||||||
✅User is online and has any "On Duty" responsibility profile selected. |
Off Duty Being in an "Off Duty" profile prevents any Contact Center participation. |
On Duty Any "On Duty" type responsibility profile allows Contact Center participation. Skills and Responsibilities in that profile must match the service to be "Selectable" ↓ . This is determined by the individual Distribution Policies assigned to the respective services. |
||||||
| Task selectable |
“In Time available” to perform tasks in Nimbus: ✅Online in MS Teams. |
"Selectable" This includes Busy/Selectable and Away/Selectable |
"Non-Selectable" state, either because: … User is not available either due to the MS Teams Presence ↑ OR … … set "inactive" for all Nimbus teams OR … ... any existing or previous Status Flag ↓ marks the user as “Not Selectable” |
|||||
| User Status flags |
✅ User is currently reserved and blocked by a Nimbus task.
|
Not Available Reason Requested from “Idle / Away” users during a task distribution. |
RONA User flag after not responding to a task, blocked for the next tasks. |
Ringing User is reserved for new task, but has not accepted yet. |
Connected User has accepted and is now blocked by a task. |
ACW User-extensible timespan to complete work after a call. |
||
USER STATE FACTORS ARE CO-DEPENDENT
💡 It is important to note that these user state factors depend on each other. The table above should be read vertically from “top to bottom and back".
🔎 In the following we're explaining each factor and its related co-depencenies:
Factor 1: MS Teams Presence
This factor is considered by all Nimbus services. Every user in MS Teams can be considered for Nimbus when part of a service.
- The MS Teams presence must meet the criteria of the Distribution Service Settings. This can be individually configured per service.
- Offline users are not considered to be in any Duty State. Nimbus will not distribute tasks.
-
Online users are considered for Nimbus tasks depending on:
- … the services they are part of and
- … the Nimbus features (e.g. licenses, modalities settings for the user.)
🔎It is noteworthy that “MS Teams presence” marks only the first layer of consideration for Nimbus. When users participate in multiple services, each service can individually regard them as “selectable” or not. Learn more about this below.
Factors 2 & 3: In Nimbus Duty State / Task selectability
These are shared criteria among services. Task Selectability in Nimbus is steered based depending on the Types of Service the user participates in.
| Advanced Routing and Enterprise Routing | Contact Center |
|---|---|
| MS-Teams "Team”-based services with a fixed pool of team members. | Nimbus standalone services with a dynamically assigned user base |
|
Advanced Routing and Enterprise Routing consider users selectable once they are set “Active” in the Nimbus UI. 💡The Duty State is a Contact Center exclusive feature and not considered for these services. |
Contact Center services replace the “Active” state with a Duty State as a conditional “is selectable” check. Evaluating that profile, Nimbus evaluates user responsibility and distributes calls conditionally based on Skills and Responsibilities. These criteria are defined in each service's Distribution Policy. |
| The entire “Online” and ”Active" pool of users with in an “MS Teams” Team is considered. | Any “Online” Nimbus user can be considered depending on the factors above, regardless of “MS Teams” membership. |
🔎When users participate in multiple services, each service can “flag” users with a blocking status as they handle tasks. Learn more about this below.
Factor 4: User Status (Flags) and Reporting
Shared Criteria among Services
- While “online” in Teams and “Active” and "On Duty" in Nimbus, a user is in principle “Selectable” for tasks by any service, in any modality, unless they are in a blocking status in Nimbus.
- The “online” status in combination with “Busy” or “Away” in Teams may be reported as either “Selectable” or “Not selectable” state, depending on the configuration set under “Conversation Distribution” for the specific service.
- Blocking status in Nimbus always takes precedence over any "Selectable" state; therefore, while being in any blocking status (e.g. Not Available, already busy when connected or in a task, in ACW or flagged by RONA), no new task will be distributed to the user. ACW, Connected and Ringing are reported as dedicated states, all other blocking statuses are reported as “Not selectable”.
- “Offline” in Teams or “Off Duty” in Nimbus are reported as dedicated user states.
User State Reporting and Data Privacy
Each time a user changes from one status to another a user state, a record is completed and written into the database. Only completed states are tracked in the Nimbus Reporting, therefore the current user state (e.g. “as of now”) will not appear in the database until the user has switched to the next user status.
Considering that a user status can change frequently throughout the working day, the User States data can become very large when looking at multiple dates.
💡GDPR Data Privacy Setting: detailed user states data allows for time-based analysis of the states of each user, e.g. in Power BI. Tracking of this data must be explicitly enabled via Tenant Administration > Data Privacy in order to be recorded in the historic reporting.
User State Types Overview
Note that the User States / Status Flags are also monitored in the Static Dimensions table of the Nimbus OData Feed. Below is a comprehensive list of all User States and their meaning:
INC User State Type Table
For Reporting purposes Nimbus tracks User States, which define the ability of a User accept and handle tasks. Below is a table of these tracked states:
Id |
Name |
|---|---|
| 1 | Offline: User offline in MS Teams and thus cannot be selected for Tasks. |
| 2 | Off Duty: User is either in a “Offduty” Duty States or “Inactive” in Nimbus UI. |
| 3 | Selectable: User logged-in MS Teams and available to take Nimbus tasks. → Also see Task Queue and Distribution. |
| 4 | Not Selectable: User is in a MS Teams presence state that blocks task distribution as per Distribution Service Settings. |
| 5 | Ringing: A task has been assigned to an User but not yet been accepted. Can be either incoming calls or when an User is accepting an Outbound Call. Also applies for non-telephony-related modalities like Email, External Task, Instant Messaging etc. |
| 6 | Connected: The User and Customer are in a session together. Also applies when the User is just handling an External Task. |
| 7 | After-Call Work: User is handling After-Call Work (ACW). |
| 9 | RONA: User flagged with RONA state by a non-accepted task. |
| 10 |
Dialing Out: User has accepted an Outbound Call and Nimbus is now ringing the target Customer.
|
| 11 | Task Limit Reached: User has reached max allowed number of tasks assigned. Even if the user state would allow for new tasks, the task limit will prevent further distribution to this User. |
🔍 You can also check for any call status flags (RONA / ACW) in Assistant - both in Nimbus UI or the standalone App.