Inconsistent Tagging and Queuing for Consecutive Calls from the Same Number

Hi Yoan Radev 

Thanks for the feedback. We appreciate your time in helping us improve our system.

I'm not sure I fully understood the issue, so I'm going to ask some follow-up questions and share some suggestions:

Our ideal solution would be for the system to detect that a customer has initiated a new call from the same number while the first call is still pending in the queue.

It's impossible for a caller to have two regular calls with the same phone number in the queue simultaneously (they would have to hang up first and dial again). It's possible, though, for a caller to request multiple callbacks using the same phone number (since they can hang up, call again, request a new callback, hang up again, and so on). That's why we do exactly what you proposed: we detect that another callback is already in the queue and ignore it. Then we add a comment to the ticket stating “callback request duplicated”, so those tickets can be automatically filtered and closed.

The first call, which we assume was abandoned by the customer to initiate the second, fails to receive the "voice_abandoned_in_queue" tag.

With OCR, all calls abandoned in the queue should receive the tag voice_abandoned_in_queue; if this is not happening, please let me know, as this may be a bug we need to look into. Additionally, the ticket title should be changed to something like “Abandoned call from….” Both conditions can be used to automatically solve these tickets, avoiding them from distracting your agents.

Our agents are presented with two concurrent tickets for the same person and waste valuable time trying to connect to the first, non-active call.

As I said, there can't be two regular calls for the same phone number, and neither abandoned calls nor duplicate callback requests are ever offered to agents. Could you let me know the support ticket number you used to contact our support, so I can take a look at your examples? 
 

Hi @widson,

Thank you for the detailed response. I understand that, logically, a single phone line cannot hold two active sessions. However, our agents are consistently experiencing a "race condition" or system latency issue where this is exactly what happens in practice.

To clarify the points you raised:

• The "Impossible" Scenario: While a caller cannot be on two calls at once, there seems to be a delay between a customer hanging up (Call A) and the Zendesk Talk system recognizing that disconnect. When a customer redials immediately (Call B), the system seems to treat Call B as a new, valid entry before it has finished processing the abandonment of Call A. This results in two tickets being routed to an agent simultaneously.
• The Tagging Issue: We are seeing that in these specific "rapid redial" cases, the first call (the ghost call) is not receiving the voice_abandoned_in_queue tag. Because the system still seems to thinks the call is "active" or "transferring" when it reaches the agent, it doesn't trigger the OCR abandonment logic you mentioned.
• Agent Impact: Agents accept the first ticket, see a "silent" or "disconnected" call, and while they are trying to troubleshoot that, the second (actual) call is ringing or waiting. This directly inflates our wait times and confuses our reporting.

As requested, to help your team investigate, here is the Support Ticket in which we reached out to Zendesk Support on the topic: 14102697

Hi, @yoan ,

First, a clarification: my colleagues reminded me that two calls can be in the queue for the same phone number if both callers are calling from a business line, behind extensions, using a PBX or even calling from a Talk number. In such cases, both calls would be routed, but of course, this wouldn't be an issue since they are from different callers.
 

With that clarified, the issue you mentioned — calls being offered to agents even after being abandoned — is definitely not expected. We are going to take a look at the ticket you referred to and see if we can find what happened there. We might reach out to ask for more details.