Skip to main content

​
Why this is a common failure point

An outbound agent that dials real customers reaches voicemail on a large share of calls. What it does next is easy to get wrong: it waits for a reply that never comes, talks over the greeting, starts its message before the beep, or leaves a message no one can act on. Each of those wastes the call, and some leave a recording your customer will actually hear.

​
How Roark tests it

Voicemail testing calls your agent into real voicemail greetings, one call per greeting, and grades whether it detected the voicemail, left a message, and how well it handled it: timing around the beep, clarity, completeness and length.

​
Running a voicemail test

1

Pick the template

On create a run, choose Voicemail testing in step 01.
2

Choose your agents

Step 02 as usual. Voicemail is voice-only: a greeting is audio, so a chat endpoint has nothing to play. Attaching one is rejected before the run starts.
3

Choose the greetings

Step 03 is a Greetings to test checklist. Every greeting is selected by default; untick the ones you don’t need. Each row has a play button so you can hear the recording before you commit to a run.
4

Run

One call runs per selected greeting, per agent. Ten greetings against two agents is twenty calls.
The call count multiplies. Leaving every greeting selected across several agents adds up quickly, so untick down to the greetings you actually care about if you’re iterating.

​
What happens on the call

Each call follows the same shape:
  1. Roark dials your agent (or answers it, for an inbound endpoint).
  2. The selected greeting plays as the first thing your agent hears: a real recording, not synthesised speech.
  3. The line then goes completely silent. The simulated caller says nothing for the rest of the call, and won’t interrupt.
  4. The call ends when your agent hangs up, or after 15 seconds of silence once it stops speaking.
That silence is the test. Everything Roark grades is a property of what your agent does into a line that never answers back. Because voicemail calls are short by construction, the template lowers the run’s max duration default to two minutes. A hung call fails fast instead of billing the usual fifteen.

​
The greetings

Roark ships a fixed set of real voicemail recordings, covering the shapes an outbound agent meets in the wild: Mailbox full is the interesting one. There’s nowhere to leave a message, so an agent that launches into its script anyway is doing the wrong thing. The correct behaviour is to recognise it and hang up. These are Roark-managed and read-only: you can select and preview them, but you can’t add your own or edit the set.

​
What gets measured

The template attaches three system metrics: As with any template, these are a starting point. Add or remove metrics in the Advanced section before running.
Read the run report per greeting, not just in aggregate. An agent can handle a carrier robot perfectly and still talk over a personal greeting, and the run report separates the calls by greeting so that shows up.

​
Next steps

Templates

The full template catalogue and what each one seeds

System Metrics

How the voicemail metrics are scored

Run Plans

Save a voicemail configuration as a reusable suite

Schedules

Run voicemail checks on a cadence