Write your follow-up sequence the way you would brief a new agent
Retry-after and max-attempts fields describe a machine. Sentences describe the job. Convarza takes the sentences.
Every outbound tool eventually ships the same form: Retry after, Max attempts, Backoff, Fallback channel. Four numeric fields that between them describe a policy no salesperson has ever thought in.
Ask a good sales manager how they follow up and you will not get numbers. You will get a sentence: "Call them. If they pick up, great. If not, try again in the afternoon — people answer more after lunch. Still nothing, WhatsApp them that evening, and one last try the next morning before I stop wasting the team's time."
The sentence contains things the form cannot hold
Read it again. "People answer more after lunch" is a reason. "Before I stop wasting the team's time" is a budget. "One last try" is a commitment about when to give up. None of that fits in retry_after_hours = 4, and all of it is why the sequence is shaped the way it is.
When you force the manager to translate their sentence into four fields, three things get lost: the reasoning, the exceptions, and their willingness to look at it again in a month. The form becomes a thing that was configured once and is now nobody's.
So take the sentence
In Convarza AI a campaign's follow-up sequence is a textarea. You write what you would tell a new hire, and the automation derives the logic. Six lines ship as a default so nobody starts at a blank box, and you edit them.
Call. If they pick up, done. If not, wait four hours and call again. Still no answer, send a WhatsApp that evening and make one last attempt tomorrow morning. After that, stop.
That is the actual input. Not a translation of it.
Two objections, both fair
"Isn't that ambiguous?" Less than you would think, because the vocabulary is small — call, wait, message, stop, and a handful of conditions. And ambiguity in a sentence gets noticed and fixed. Ambiguity in a number does not: nobody has ever looked at max_attempts = 5 and thought "hang on, is that per lead or per campaign?" until it was already wrong.
"What about the settings that are genuinely numeric?" Some are, and they belong elsewhere. Concurrency is a property of the phone line, so it lives on the channel as allowed calls count. Calling hours are a property of the line too, with a proper per-day editor and a timezone — a campaign inherits them and can only override for itself. Neither belongs on the campaign form, because neither is campaign-shaped.
The general principle
Ask what shape the decision actually has in the user's head, and build that. A cadence is prose. A schedule is a grid. A permission is a role. When the interface matches the shape of the thought, people maintain it. When it does not, they configure it once, forget what it does, and quietly stop trusting the output.