Duty Schedule

The Duty Schedule module manages on-call rotations, routes urgent notifications to the right personnel, and gives voice agents the ability to reach on-duty staff automatically during a call.

What It Does

Core Concepts

Schedules

A schedule entry assigns a staff member to an on-call window. Each entry has a start and end date/time, a priority (lower number = higher priority), and links to a personnel record.

When multiple people overlap in a window, they are all considered on-duty and ordered by priority.

Personnel

The personnel roster stores staff members with first name, last name, email, phone, and specialties. Phone numbers are used for SMS notifications from voice agents.

Specialties

Specialties are labeled skills or roles (e.g. HVAC, Electrical, Network Security) assigned to personnel. Voice agents can request a specific specialty when sending a notification, and the system will prefer personnel who have that specialty.

Confirmation Flow

When a voice agent uses the duty-notify-confirm tool, the system:

  1. Builds an ordered queue of currently on-duty staff (filtered by specialty if requested, then sorted by priority)
  2. Sends an SMS to the first person in the queue
  3. Waits for a reply within the configured timeout (default 20 minutes)
  4. If the person replies YES (or similar), the notification is marked confirmed
  5. If they reply NO or don't reply in time, the system escalates to the next person
  6. If the entire queue is exhausted without confirmation, the configured fail behavior runs (notify default contact, notify fallback contact, or log only)

Rules & Preferences

Plain-text scheduling rules are stored per tenant and injected into the AI assistant's system context on every conversation. This lets teams encode recurring policies (e.g. "Always contact the HVAC-specialty technician first for heating or cooling issues") without repeating them in every message.

The assistant proactively suggests saving policies it detects in conversation.

Voice Agent Tools

Three tools are available for voice agents to interact with the Duty Schedule module. They can be enabled per campaign in the campaign settings under the Tools tab.

Tool Purpose
duty-check Look up who is currently on duty
duty-notify Send a notification to on-duty staff (fire and forget)
duty-notify-confirm Send a notification and track SMS confirmation with escalation

See Voice Agent Tools for full parameter and response documentation.

Setting Up

  1. Add personnel — Go to Duty Schedule → Personnel and add your staff with their phone numbers and specialties.
  2. Create schedules — Use the calendar view to assign staff to on-call windows.
  3. Configure settings — Set a default contact (used when no one is scheduled) and configure the confirmation settings if you need the duty-notify-confirm flow.
  4. Enable tools on campaigns — In your voice agent campaign, go to the Tools tab and enable the duty tools you want the agent to use.
  5. Write scheduling rules — Go to the Rules tab and add any recurring policies you want the AI assistant to follow automatically.