Why are some transferred calls left waiting indefinitely?

Question

Can call transfer time out? When one of my agents transferred a call to a group, the customer was on hold for several minutes and did not go to voicemail. Why did this happen to the caller? When transferring between one group to another, if the other group does not answer, customers are waiting forever. Is this normal? Is there any way to make the call transfer time out and for callers to leave a voicemail if the group isn't available? Is there any way to negate the infinite transfer time?

Answer

Two factors cause this:

Maximum queue wait time is ignored when you transfer a call.

If you transfer a call to a group and any agent has the Away status instead of Offline, the caller does not go to voicemail until all agents decline the call. The Away status blocks voicemail until everyone declines.

Negating the infinite transfer time

Currently, Zendesk voice does not enforce the maximum queue wait time on transferred calls, which can lead to the situation you described where callers wait indefinitely if agents appear Away instead of Offline.

As a workaround to the maximum wait time being ignored:

Either encourage agents to switch their status to Offline when unavailable to allow calls to proceed to voicemail

Or enable omnichannel routing, if your account supports it. With omnichannel routing turned on, calls will be offered to agents in a round-robin fashion and will respect the maximum queue wait time before going to voicemail.

For more information about call transfers, see this article: Transferring calls.