Pause, resume and stop a campaign
What to do when something is wrong, what happens to contacts mid-sequence, and why pausing beats deleting.
A campaign has three states — Active, Paused and Draft — and the pause button is the most important control in the whole feature, because a campaign going wrong gets worse every minute.
The instinct when something sounds off is to investigate first. Do the opposite: pause first, diagnose second. A paused campaign costs you a few minutes of dialling. A campaign with a bad script running for an hour costs you several hundred customers' goodwill.
Steps
Pause the moment something sounds wrong
Before you know what it is. Pausing costs you a few minutes of dialling; a bad script running for an hour costs you several hundred customers' goodwill.
This is the one place in the product where acting before diagnosing is the right instinct.
Expect calls in progress to finish
Pausing stops new calls being placed. It does not hang up on somebody mid-conversation, which would be a considerably worse experience.
Fix the cause, not the symptom
If the bot is wrong, fix the bot — and remember that changes it everywhere it is used. If the audience is wrong, fix the filter. If the number is wrong, that is a channel.
Resume and watch the first few
Listen to two calls before walking away. Resuming and leaving is how the same problem runs for another hour.
Check the contacts who were mid-sequence
Their activity feeds show where they got to. Somebody who received attempt two and nothing since may deserve a manual call rather than being left half-worked.
Stop rather than pause when it is finished
A paused campaign everyone has forgotten is a campaign that will surprise somebody in three months when they resume it by accident.
Check it worked
After resuming, watch the dial attempts number climb for a few minutes. If it does not move, the pause was not the only thing stopping it — check the line's hours and concurrency next.
The parts people get wrong
- Pausing does not undo stage changes already made by outcomes. Those have happened.
- If you paused because of a compliance concern, deal with the affected contacts explicitly. DND is not applied retroactively to people you already called.