How Contact Center Lite works

Contact Center Lite is built for a front desk or a small team that shares one line. Calls arrive in an enhanced ring group, callers wait their turn, and team members log in when they're ready to take calls. Lite adds the tools to watch that work live and measure it afterward.

This feature needs the Contact Center Lite or Contact Center Pro plan. See plans and pricing

Enhanced ring groups themselves come with every plan, so the guides marked "On every plan" below apply to Business too. The live wallboards, member performance dashboard, scheduled reports and Smart Callback are what need Contact Center Lite.

What an enhanced ring group does

An enhanced ring group is a ring group made for a steady flow of calls. On top of what a basic ring group does, it can:

• Keep callers waiting on hold music when every member is busy, up to a limit you set.
• Let callers know their position and roughly how long they'll wait.
• Let members log in when they start taking calls and log out when they step away.
• Give a member a short pause after each call before the next one rings.
• Send callers somewhere else when the line is full, the wait runs long or no one is available.
• Send an email when a caller gives up before anyone answers.

Enhanced ring groups come with every CallSprout plan, Business included, and your admin sets them up in the admin portal. Contact Center Lite builds on them with the features below.

What Contact Center Lite adds

Contact Center Lite includes everything in Business, plus:

• Live wallboards. Calls waiting, answered and abandoned, and which members are free or on a call, updated as it happens.
• Member performance dashboard. Each member's status and their answered and missed calls.
• Scheduled reports with automated delivery. Ring group reports that run on a schedule and arrive by email.
• Smart Callback. Calls back callers who hang up or time out in an enhanced ring group.
• Local presence dialing. Your outgoing calls show a number that matches the area code you're calling. Local numbers are billed as an add-on.

Members and supervisors see the wallboards and member dashboard in the ring group dashboard in CallSprout Communicator NEXT. The dashboard is included with Contact Center Lite, and so is Communicator NEXT for anyone who uses the dashboard.

What stays on Contact Center Pro

Contact Center Pro has everything in Lite and adds call queues with agent login, skills-based routing, supervisor whisper and barge, the outbound dialer and the omnichannel agent workspace. On Lite, the people answering are regular users who belong to a ring group. They log in with ring group star codes, not the queue agent codes Pro uses.

Who does what

• Your admin creates the groups, picks the members and sets up announcements, callbacks and overflow in the admin portal.
• Members log in to their groups, log out when they step away, and answer the calls.
• CallSprout support turns on Contact Center Lite for your account.
• The dashboard in Communicator NEXT is turned on person by person, by CallSprout support. Your admin tells support who should see it.

Guides in this section

On every plan:

• Set up an enhanced ring group for your team
• Log in and out as an enhanced ring group member
• Tell callers their place in line and wait time
• Wrap up time, and what happens when nobody is available

On Contact Center Lite and Pro:

• Offer callers a callback instead of waiting
• Watch your groups with the ring group dashboard
• Ring group statistics, missed calls and repeat callers