Asking before placing a call
Setting the voice channel to ask_before_send turns every call Connect would place into a held decision. The number is not dialled; the item appears in Waiting For You with the person, the reason and the follow-up it came from. Approving places the call through the same gates as any other outbound; a call-back left waiting more than a day is closed as missed rather than rung late.
What the setting covers#
It covers calls Connect places. An inbound call is a different path — the caller is already on the line and there is nobody to ask — so the gate is about dialling out, not about answering. Within outbound, it covers every source equally: a call-back promised in an earlier conversation, a follow-up falling due, or a call the engine decides is the right next action.
How a due call becomes a queued decision#
A phone follow-up falls due.
Result The engine drains phone follow-ups on every tick, two at a time, through the same call-placing path a person's own outbound call would use.
The gates are evaluated before anything is dialled.
Result Suppression, a block on the contact, the allowance and the line's own readiness are all checked first.
The voice mode is consulted.
Result Under
ask_before_sendthe outcome recorded against the follow-up is *awaiting approval*, with the item's identifier — not *call placed*.The item appears in Waiting For You and in Needs You.
Result It stays there until somebody decides, or until it goes too stale to be worth ringing.
Three outcomes are possible on each attempt and all three are recorded: the call was placed, the call is awaiting approval, or the call was refused with a reason. A line that is not ready is not treated as a refusal to be argued with — it is retried about an hour later, which is why a transient carrier problem does not turn into a lost call-back.
What the approver sees, and decides#
- Who — the person and the organisation, with the number the call would go to.
- Why — the follow-up or the conversation the call comes from, with its reason, rather than a bare instruction to ring somebody.
- When it was due — so a call-back that has slipped is visibly a slipped one.
- Two decisions — approve, and the call is placed through the usual gates; reject, and it is recorded against the follow-up as a decision rather than silently dropped.
A held call is not a quiet call. From the customer's side nothing has happened at all: no missed call, no voicemail, no number in their log. If somebody was told they would be rung this afternoon, an approval sitting untouched until tomorrow is a broken promise rather than a delayed one, and that is the reason the queue is ranked rather than ordered by arrival.
When a call-back is too late to make#
A phone follow-up more than 24 hours past its due time is closed as missed and never rung. That is a deliberate refusal to make a very late call: ringing somebody a day and a half after they were promised a call is worse than not ringing at all, because it reopens a matter they have already resolved elsewhere and does it out of context.
- The item disappeared before anyone approved it
- It passed the late cut-off and was closed as missed. The record stays; the call does not happen.
- The queue is filling with the same person
- Several follow-ups resolve to one contact. Handle them as one call and complete the others, rather than approving each.
- Approving does nothing visible
- The line was not ready. The attempt is retried about an hour later; line health problems escalate into Needs You on their own.
- Calls run long
- A call has a maximum duration of 30 minutes; it ends there whatever the mode.
Questions#
Does this stop Connect answering the phone as well?
No. The setting holds calls Connect would place. Answering an inbound call is a separate path, and if you want a number to stop being answered by Connect entirely, that is the off mode or the number's own routing rather than an approval rule.
What happens to a promised call-back if nobody approves it in time?
Once it is more than a day late it is closed as missed and is not rung. The follow-up record keeps the history, so the next person to look at that relationship can see a commitment was made and not met.
Can I require approval for calls but not for email?
Yes — that is the most common configuration of the two channels. Autonomy is per channel, so voice can sit on ask_before_send while email runs autonomous.