If there’s one essential thing we’ve learned from being in the business of digital operations for more than 13 years, it’s that every business has a unique approach to building resilience with its bespoke tech stacks and processes. 

Many PagerDuty customers around the world are starting to provide direct access to their on-call teams with Live Call Routing (LCR). Simply put, LCR is a PagerDuty add-on feature that allows organizations to extend their customer support for incident response by dynamically routing calls or voicemails to on-call responders.  

Think of LCR as a hotline to on-call teams, making it possible for customers or staff to report incidents faster. LCR removes the operational complexity of phone-called incidents by automating this process, and ensuring the on-call teams receive and resolve incidents quickly and effectively. All inbound calls get routed based on the schedules of the on-call team, so anyone can reach the right responder immediately or leave a voicemail that becomes an incident. 

What are the business challenges with live calls today?

Whether an employee is seeking help about a system failure, or a customer is reporting a failed system, human-reported incidents are documented when a first responder creates an IT ticket. The responder, however, may not be the subject matter expert (SME) and will call multiple teams across the business to find the right help. In some cases, the true expert may not be on call, or  didn’t find a replacement while on vacation. No system could easily enable the responder to seek an alternative expert for help, so the incident remains stuck with no solution.

The real challenge for businesses is to reduce the mean-time-to-acknowledge (MTTA) and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR). The traditional IT ticketing system is a way to record an incident but it’s not a faster way to resolve it. 

What are some LCR benefits?

LCR ensures that your customers get the best experience with your services. For example, your customer can have a real-time conversation with on-call staff by calling a direct line, bypassing the need to look up an on-call schedule and significantly reducing the MTTA and MTTR. In addition, LCR can forward customer calls via the same global on-call schedules and escalation rules to ensure a responder from the right team takes action on the issue.   

Suppose your responder is in the middle of a call and cannot answer the incoming request. In this case, the customer can leave a voicemail, and LCR will automatically trigger an incident for the next available responder. LCR can also easily provision local and international phone numbers via PagerDuty, so your business can set your on-call teams to support customers worldwide.

Some Common use cases for Live Call Routing

Based on customer interviews, we’ve identified a few common use cases for Live Call Routing:

• An exclusive line for a key partner:  A payment service that has an important partner generates 80 percent of the revenue in a large region. The service wants to give this partner a “VIP” treatment and provide an exclusive phone number, enabled with Live Call Routing, to call the support team whenever they have an emergency. Though the partner only called the number once in the last several years, it prevented a major outage for the entire region, saved millions of dollars, and prevented several million disappointed customers.
• Tag assets with a hotline number:  A business offers over 100 different watercrafts, from boats to jet skis, along the California coast for rental. Each type of vessel has a unique hotline number for renters to call for help. But this forces the rental business and their responders to manage multiple hotline numbers across their many rental offerings, making it difficult for responders to distinguish which phone number is for which vessel, and which incidents to address. The business enabled Live Call Routing into “one hotline number” that could service all the rented vessels, and allow callers to choose a service from a list. Incidents are now properly identified and routed to the right expert who can address the incident in less time. 
• A direct line for the internal teams:   A technology company of over 1,000 employees has multiple teams delivering many different customer services worldwide. When a service is down, tracking the responsible team and their schedule is impossible because the information is neither shared nor accessible across teams. Live Call Routing is enabled to create one direct line that can address all incidents for multiple services and directly link the call to the right team in charge. Each team can resolve incidents faster and streamline operations to provide better customer services worldwide.

Why PagerDuty’s Live Call Routing?

PagerDuty’s Live Call Routing transforms how businesses manage human-call incidents by connecting the incident with the right experts for help. It drives down response time by eliminating all the typical administrative complexity involved in getting the right staff on-call, with flexibility capabilities such as call routing, phone trees, global number provision, and more. 

PagerDuty’s LCR ensures 24X7 coverage and confirms customer-reported incidents are immediately routed and escalated to the right individual or team(s). Most importantly, you can manage the incidents your way by getting notified and taking action on incidents via preferred communication methods. Even if your human-called incident goes into voicemail, it will automatically become an incident.    

We want to hear from you!

We are always looking to speak with customers and learn about your ideas and use cases that could leverage Live Call Routing. We have created an “Office Hour” to allow you to ask questions, exchange ideas, and validate whether Live Call Routing is a good fit for your organization. Please sign up for a free 30-minute session using Calendly, and we’ll look forward to a meeting with you and your team. 

Learn more about Live Call Routing and its capabilities by watching “Always Reach On-Call Responders Immediately with Live Call Routing,” presented by Ben Wiegelmann, Senior Product Manager of Live Call Routing. He shares some common use cases and demonstrates key capabilities that improve your MTTA and MTTR.