Placing Outbound Calls

Dial one call, a whole list through an orchestration, or automatically on a trigger — with voicemail handling, extensions and a daily cap.

Placing Outbound Calls

An outbound voice agent does not dial on its own. Something has to tell it who to call: a person placing one call, an orchestration working a list, or an event in your workspace. This article covers each of those, plus the three things that decide whether a batch of outbound calls goes well — voicemail handling, extensions and the daily budget.

What you'll need

Place a single call

The quickest way, and the one you will use while you are still tuning the agent, is on the agent itself:

  1. Open the agent (Agents → Agent Types → Voice Agents → click the row's eye icon, then Edit Voice Agent) and go to the Test & Deploy tab.
  2. In the Simulate Call card, enter a number under Phone number to call.
  3. Click Simulate Call.

This places a real call over the full telephony path — transfers, voicemail detection and caller-ID contact lookup all behave as they would in production — using the agent's current configuration.

There is also a lighter single-call page at /voice/<agent id>/use (sign-in required) — "Use Voice Agent" → Initiate a Call → Phone Number → Start Call — which returns the call id so you can find the record afterwards. It has no menu entry, so reach it by editing the URL of the agent's view page: swap /view for /use.

Both place real calls that cost real minutes and count against your daily budget. Call a number you control.

Call a list with an orchestration

This is the supported way to call more than one person.

flowchart LR
    A["Trigger<br/>(schedule, form, CRM event…)"] --> B["Orchestration"]
    B --> C["Place Call step<br/>Phone Agent + Include Lists"]
    C --> D["One queued call<br/>per contact"]
    D --> E{"Daily budget<br/>reached?"}
    E -- no --> F["Agent dials"]
    E -- yes --> G["Remaining calls blocked<br/>until tomorrow"]
    F --> H["Call record, transcript,<br/>summary, outcome"]
  1. Build the audience as a List — see Lists.
  2. Go to Agents → Workflows → Orchestrations and open or create one.
  3. Add a Place Call action step.
  4. Configure it:
    • Phone Agent — the outbound voice agent to dial with.
    • Include Lists — whose contacts to call.
    • Exclude Lists — who to leave out (suppression lists, existing customers, anyone already in another sequence).
  5. Save, validate and launch the orchestration.

One call is queued per contact. Contacts without a usable phone number are skipped rather than failing the step.

Because it is an orchestration, everything else orchestrations do is available around the call: wait steps, branching on the outcome, sending the follow-up email or SMS, creating a task when the call did not connect. The step exposes the resulting callId to later steps, so a follow-up can reference the specific call.

Call automatically, on an event

Anything that can trigger an orchestration can trigger a call: a form submission, a CRM change, a schedule, an inbound event. The pattern is the same — the trigger starts the orchestration, the Place Call step does the dialling.

Two other paths exist and are worth knowing about:

Passing context into the call

When a call comes from an orchestration or a form submission, the triggering data travels with it: the form fields, the journey context. Those become {{placeholders}} you can use in the agent's instructions and greeting, so the agent opens the call already knowing what it is about. See Instructions, Goals and Scheduled Prompts.

Voicemail

Outbound calls hit answering machines. The platform listens to the greeting when the call connects and the agent can also flag a machine mid-call; what happens next is yours to choose on the Voice tab, under Voicemail:

When an answering machine picks up What happens
The agent leaves a message in its own words (default) The agent writes and speaks the voicemail itself, from your Voicemail instructions and what it knows about the call — who it is calling, why, from where. Leave the instructions blank and it uses its judgement.
The agent says this exact message Your Exact message is spoken word for word (placeholders such as {{first_name}} are filled). If it is blank, the pre-dial brief's line is used when the brief is on.
Hang up without a message The call ends silently.

Detection hints (optional) tell the platform how your customers' machines tend to sound; they help it recognise one and never change what the agent says. The call record shows the outcome (voicemail) and the message the agent left is in the transcript.

An agent that was saved with an exact message before this choice existed keeps saying it until you pick an option.

Voicemail handling runs on outbound calls today.

Extensions

If the number you are calling sits behind an extension, the agent can dial it automatically after the callee answers. The extension is taken from, in order:

  1. The contact's extension field in the CRM.
  2. An extension embedded in the phone number itself — +1 555 123 4567 ext 412 and +15551234567,412 both work.
  3. An extension field in the triggering form data.

For menus rather than extensions — "press 2 for accounts" — enable send-dtmf on the Tools tab so the agent can work through the menu itself.

Cap the spend

Settings (the gear icon) → Channels → Daily Call Budget (tenant admin):

Set it before your first list, not after. It is the difference between an error in an orchestration costing you an afternoon and costing you a reputation.

Billing limits are separate and workspace-wide — see Spend Limits.

Watch the calls happen

Calls appear on the agent's Calls page as they run (Agents → Agent Types → Voice Agents → the row's Calls button, or the Calls button on the agent's view page). Transcripts and AI summaries land shortly after each call ends, once post-call analysis has run. See Calls, Transcripts and Recordings.

Troubleshooting

Next steps