# Outcome

An **outcome** is what Connect's engine concluded a call was, derived from the conversation itself: a new enquiry, a demo request, a pricing question, support, a complaint, something not relevant, or a call that never became a conversation at all. It is stored beside — never on top of — the [disposition](/docs/glossary/disposition/) a person sets.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **Channels:** phone
- **In the app:** #/calls
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/outcome/

## The values, and the two groups they fall into

| Outcome | Means | Follow-up considered? |
|---|---|---|
| new_enquiry | Somebody new asking about what you do | Yes |
| demo_request | They want to be shown it | Yes |
| pricing_request | They asked what it costs | Yes |
| support | An existing customer with a problem | Yes |
| complaint | Something has gone wrong for them | Yes |
| not_relevant | Not business — a wrong number, a sales call to you | No |
| no_answer | Nobody picked up | No |
| not_reached | Answered, but nothing was exchanged | No |
| after_hours / line_off | The line was not taking calls | No |

The right-hand column is why the outcome matters operationally rather than only descriptively. A call whose outcome is in the second group produces no scheduled contact, and neither does a call with no usable number attached. That is the guard against a queue filling with call-backs to wrong numbers and to a voicemail nobody left.

## Answered is not the same as reached

**not_reached** is the value worth understanding, because it looks like a fault and usually is one. The carrier reported the call as answered, and yet nothing was exchanged — the audio path never carried anything the engine could hear, or the model session failed before a word was spoken. From the outside this is indistinguishable from a very quiet caller, which is why it is recorded as its own outcome rather than collapsed into *no answer*.

Collapsing them would hide a specific failure behind a normal one. A workspace with a rising count of unanswered calls investigates its marketing; a workspace with a rising count of calls answered in silence has something broken. [When a call is answered in silence](/research/silent-failure/) is the long version.

> **Careful** The outcome is derived from the conversation and can be wrong — a complaint delivered politely reads as an enquiry more often than anyone would like. That is precisely what the human disposition beside it is for, and disagreement between the two is the signal to look at.

## Three other things called an outcome

**The autonomy decision** — When Connect decides whether it may act, the decision itself has an outcome — approve, draft, or refuse. Same English word, a different record, and it is read on the [Decision Log](/docs/glossary/audit/) rather than on the call.
**The provider status** — Ringing, answered, busy, no answer, failed, cancelled, voicemail. That is the [carrier's](/docs/glossary/carrier/) report about the network, and *answered* there does not imply a conversation here.
**The [call summary](/docs/phone/call-summary/)** — Prose describing what was said. The outcome is one word the software acts on; the summary is several sentences a person reads.

The first is the one that causes real confusion when reading logs, because both are legitimately called an outcome by the code that owns them. If the sentence is about a call, it means the classification above; if it is about a decision, it means whether Connect was allowed to act.

## Questions

### Can I change an outcome?

The outcome is the engine's field. What a person records is the [disposition](/docs/glossary/disposition/), which sits beside it — so a disagreement is preserved as a disagreement rather than the record being rewritten to agree with itself.

### Why did a promising call produce no follow-up?

Either its outcome was in the group that schedules nothing, or no usable number was attached to it. Both are visible on the call record, and both are fixable — a follow-up can be created by hand at any time.

### Does the outcome affect what Connect says on the next call?

It is part of the record the next conversation is given, alongside the summary and what is remembered about the caller. It informs the context rather than acting as an instruction.

## Related

- [Disposition](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/disposition/)
- [Follow-up](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/follow-up/)
- [Call outcomes and dispositions](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/phone/call-outcome/)
- [Calls that were never a conversation](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/phone/not-a-conversation/)
- [When a call is answered in silence](https://connectbyjbrh.com/research/silent-failure/)

## What this page is based on

- `backend/app/voice.py` — the outcome vocabulary and the values that schedule nothing
- `backend/app/models.py` — outcome and disposition as separate columns
- `docs-source/facts.py` — CAPABILITY_STATUS call_summary, call_transcript