How do I accept an incoming call or message?

Setting yourself ready. Receiving calls. Receiving messages.

Setting yourself ready

When you log in to your agent account, you will not immediately start receiving calls and messages. To set yourself ready, you must start inbound. On the Inbound page:

Click the Start inbound button. This will make you available to serve whichever queues you are assigned to. You will receive calls and messages from those queues.
Whenever you need to stop receiving calls or messages again, click the Stop inbound button.

Receiving calls

When a call arrives to a queue, it will be offered to an available agent. Each agent can only deal with one call at a time.

When a call is offered to you, the call notification appears in the bottom left of the Omni interface.

Click Answer to pick up the call. The call dialog will open, showing the contact's history and contact details. Although this dialog fills most of the screen, it can be minimised to access other sections of Omni if needed.
Click Reject to decline the call. It will be offered to the next available agent instead.
If you do not click either button, after a short period, the call will automatically be rejected for you. In this case, LeadDesk assumes you are not at your desk and will automatically switch off Inbound, so no further calls or messages will be offered until you start inbound again.

Receiving messages

When a message arrives, it will be offered to an agent, appearing in their Active list. You can be offered new messages while you are already dealing with others, limited by any capacity rules your Admin has set up.

Note that the message will only appear on one agent's Active list at a time. The Active list does not act as a group inbox, where agents can manually pick which emails to answer. Instead it shows each agent the messages they are working on, plus whichever message they are currently being offered.

Clients wanting an approach more like a group inbox might consider enabling agents to pick messages from the queue directly.

Active list

The entry in the Active list will show you:

The name of the contact (if known).
The subject line of an email, or the start of the text if an SMS.
The name of the project for this contact.
A blue dot for unread messages. (Once a message has been accepted you will also see a number in brackets showing the number of unread messages).
An icon showing the type of message received.

In this case the agent is dealing with an SMS from Rob Edwards when they are offered an email from Alice Davenport.

Click Accept to pick up the message to deal with it.
If you click Reject it will be offered to the next available agent. If all available agents reject the message it may be offered to you again.
If you do not click either button, after a short pause, the message will be treated as though you rejected it. Unlike with calls, this does not stop your Inbound.