What it does

Covers the operational controls on voice proactive engagements: how failed calls are retried, how related contacts (a household or an account) are dialled as one chain, how display numbers are rotated, and how you cancel and suppress queued calls with policies.

Key facts

• Retries trigger on four fixed systemic outcomes (No answer, Busy, Failed, Answering Machine) and on disposition codes you create under the category Not right party.
• Up to 10 attempts, with a wait of 5 minutes to 48 hours between them. Retries can be prioritised same as, higher than or lower than new deliveries.
• Follow up on SMS can send an SMS engagement once all retries are exhausted. It's in preview and needs opting in.
• Contact chaining groups up to five contacts. Phone type order defaults to Mobile, Business, Home. Contact first (default) tries all of one contact's numbers before the next contact, while Phone type first tries the top phone type across every contact first. A pass can mean up to 15 dials.
• Delays: 5 to 60 minutes between phone types, 5 to 240 minutes between contacts.
• Display numbers must match the workstream number's type, you can pick several at engagement level only, and shared numbers can't be used. Distribution is either automated pseudo-random rotation or up to five rules on contact fields such as state, city or postcode.
• Copilot dial mode allows at most 500 concurrent calls, with a failure-rate stop between 1 and 5 percent.
• A cancellation policy filters with AND logic on engagement ID, country or region, state and postcode, with an optional Execute policy until date. It only affects queued calls. For API-driven work, CCaaS_CreateOperation cancels a delivery and CCaaS_CancelDeliveryTask stops a whole chain.

When to use / skip

Use the chaining and cancellation controls for collections, renewals and recall campaigns where the right person is one of several. Skip chaining for single-contact reminders, where it only adds delay settings to explain.

Configuration decisions

• Retry count and spacing against the client's contact policy and any regulatory limit on call attempts.
• Engagement sequence: contact first respects the primary contact, phone type first reaches someone sooner.
• Whether an SMS fallback is acceptable under the consent you actually hold for SMS.
• Display number strategy, including local presence rules by region.
• Who is allowed to create cancellation policies and how they're recorded.

Gotchas

• Cancellation doesn't recall calls already in progress, and in-flight work may continue.
• Ten retries over a long chain can quietly exceed the contact attempts a regulator allows. Do the arithmetic.
• Custom retry dispositions only work if the disposition category is set correctly; wrong category, no retry, no error.
• Rule-based display numbers need clean contact data. Mixed-case state names are enough to miss a rule.

Consultant notes

• Write the retry and suppression rules on one page with the client's compliance owner before configuring anything. They almost always change.
• Use cancellation policies as the incident lever (bad data file, outage, regional emergency) and rehearse it once in UAT.
• Test chains with real phones in different time zones. The delay maths looks right on paper and surprises people live.

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Revisit when SMS fallback leaves preview or the retry limits change.