Agent Alert: ringing the agent on an inbound call

An agent staring at their screen, headset on, will not always notice the instant a call arrives. A small sound fixes that: a quick ding tells them to look up and get ready. The Agent Alert settings on an in-group control that sound, the brief pause before the customer is connected, and even special alerts for repeat callers.

The alert sound itself

The Agent Alert Filename is the audio that plays to the agent to announce an incoming call. By default it is a file named ding, which is the gentle chime most teams know. You can swap it for any sound file on the server if you want something more distinctive. To turn the alert off entirely, set this field to X, and the agent will simply get the call with no preceding sound.

Most teams keep the alert on. A logged-in Agent handling inbound calls is often multitasking between calls, and a clear cue means the customer is not greeted by silence while the agent scrambles to notice them.

The delay before the call connects

Right next to the sound is the Agent Alert Delay. This is how long the system waits, in milliseconds, after playing the alert before it actually sends the call to the agent. The default is 1000, which is one second. That one second gives the agent a beat to register the ding, glance at the screen, and be ready before the customer is on the line. If your agents say customers are talking before they have caught up, a slightly longer delay can help; if it feels sluggish, you can shorten it.

Special alerts for repeat callers

There is a nice extra hiding here. You can set up a second and third agent alert that play a different sound when the caller is someone who already contacted this in-group recently. You choose the trigger: it can match on the same phone number, or on the same specific customer Lead, looking back over a window you set in seconds. The default lookback is ten minutes.

This is genuinely useful. If a different ding tells the agent this is a callback, they can answer with we are sorry you had to call again instead of starting cold. You can even narrow the trigger to only count calls that hit their drop timeout, or to include calls that were handled by your no-agent-no-queue routing, so the alert really means this person did not get helped last time.

The agent alert is one small piece of how a call lands smoothly on an Ingroup, and it pairs naturally with the routing controls that decide which agent gets the call. For the ordering side of that, see our piece on the Next Agent Call setting. The whole journey is laid out in the inbound call handling guide, and if you are still choosing where to run your dialer, our pricing page has the details.