Phone call lifecycle and outcomes

Understand call status, outcome, and disposition; use call completion events without assuming a connected call reached a person or has a final summary.

A phone attempt has a connection lifecycle and a result. Keep these separate from the session’s resolved or unresolved status: a connected call does not prove the customer’s request was resolved.

Disposition-based follow-ups require Call → Disposition in your workflow builder. If it is absent in your workspace, contact support before configuring these recipes. Existing Outcome values alone cannot distinguish busy, declined, and voicemail.

Status, outcome, and disposition

Field	What it describes	Examples
Call status	The attempt’s connection state	Initiating, ringing, in progress, completed, missed, no answer, busy, rejected, failed, canceled.
Workflow outcome	The broad way an AI call ended	completed, transferred, unanswered, failed.
Disposition	The more specific result supported by available evidence	busy, voicemail, human_answered, or unknown.
Session status	Whether the customer session remains open or has been closed	Independent of whether a person answered the phone.

Disposition reference

Disposition	Meaning
human_answered	Answer detection identified a person on a connected call.
no_answer	The attempt ended without an answer.
busy	The call result explicitly reported a busy line.
declined	The call was rejected; the result does not necessarily identify who rejected it.
voicemail	Answer detection identified something other than a person: a voicemail greeting, a phone menu, a call-screening prompt, or a carrier announcement such as a full or unset mailbox.
failed	The attempt failed.
canceled	The attempt was canceled.
unknown	There is insufficient evidence to identify the answer type.

Busy, declined, canceled, and voicemail attempts use the broad workflow outcome unanswered. A connected call can have completed with disposition unknown. Keep an explicit fallback branch instead of treating every unclassified call as answered by a person.

For outbound AI calls with answer detection, the agent starts its greeting after pickup while checking for voicemail in the background. Recipients do not need to speak first. When voicemail is detected, the agent stops speaking and ends the call; part of the opening may already have played. If detection is inconclusive or unavailable, the call continues normally. Test the languages and routes you use. In sequences, detected voicemail is a failed voice step with reason voicemail, and does not count as a reply that exits the journey. A connected call on which the recipient never speaks is recorded as no answer, not as a reply: only a call where the recipient actually spoke, or where answer detection identified a person, concludes the journey.

Use Call Finished

The Call Finished trigger supports follow-ups after AI calls, including outbound attempts that fail before the agent speaks. It is separate from Make phone call, which starts a call and can wait for its outcome. See Workflow call results for that action’s statuses, timeout behavior, and guidance for updating existing workflows. Neither a completed call nor an immediate success result proves a person answered.

Workflow field	Reference	Use
Call ID	trigger.call.callId	Identify an attempt when available.
Direction	trigger.call.direction	Restrict outbound follow-ups to outbound.
Disposition	trigger.call.disposition	Choose the follow-up branch.
Outcome	trigger.call.outcome	Preserve existing broad outcome rules.
End Time	trigger.call.endTime	Record when the call ended.
Duration	trigger.call.duration	Call duration; may be zero on failed attempts.
Summary	trigger.call.summary	Available summary text; may be empty.
Session ID	trigger.call.ticket.ticketId	Link the attempt to its OpenCX session.
Contact ID	trigger.call.ticket.contact.id	Select the OpenCX contact for a follow-up.

Call Finished can run before the final summary is generated. Log the outcome immediately if needed. Retrieve the finished session later before updating a CRM note with a final summary. A fixed delay alone is not proof that the summary is ready.

The ticket segment in workflow references is the existing field identifier for the session. Keep it unchanged in expressions.

Webhooks and repeat attempts

External receivers can use phone_call.ended. Its optional call_id and disposition fields describe the attempt; workflow fields use callId instead. Check the actual payload before building rules for a human-call or legacy calling route.

A session may contain multiple attempts. Each AI call attempt can trigger its own Call Finished workflows; repeated completion events for the same attempt do not run them again. Store the attempt identifier alongside any CRM note or follow-up you create, and make your receiver handle repeated delivery without repeating that side effect. When a call ID is missing, review the event rather than grouping every call from that customer under one permanent deduplication key.

Continue with Follow-up workflows for WhatsApp, callbacks, and CRM logging.

Read evidence for a specific call

Add Get Phone Call Details after Call Finished, using trigger.call.callId and trigger.call.ticket.ticketId. The lookup checks both the session and organization and never substitutes a newer call.

The result provides recorded duration, queue waiting time, human pickup evidence, and the end actor when known. Ended by is agent for a recorded teammate end action, system for a completed IVR hang-up command, and unknown when neither is recorded. A teammate ending the human part and the IVR later ending a survey are separate events; the teammate ID remains available. Do not infer the end actor from the current assignee or from a generic disconnect.

Use Answer time seconds against the source queue’s target in a workflow. For inbound calls, it measures the time from the first recorded invitation until an identified teammate joins the call, excluding the initial IVR. External phone transfers and conference participants do not count as teammate pickup. Accepting an invitation alone does not count as pickup; if no teammate join is recorded, pickup remains unconfirmed. For outbound calls, Human answered is false and the pickup and queue-timing fields are empty: a teammate joining does not establish that the customer answered. Calls without confirmed teammate pickup have no answer-time value. Queue wait seconds can describe an unanswered attempt when its end is recorded. An unanswered call is not automatically an abandoned call: use caller hang-up evidence before classifying abandonment. These fields do not create an aggregate service-level report or apply a chat reply SLA.