What does the integration do?
Once connected, Surfboard will pull historical data from Aircall to:
Show your actual ticket count from Aircall within Surfboard
Generate forecasts and staffing requirements
Track agent performance and attendance within Aircall
For Aircall, forecasting and performance reporting require two different connections due to differing data sources.
How to set-up forecasting via Aircall
Step 1: Connect Surfboard to Aircall
The forecasting connection is made via API:
Go to Connections in settings.
Select 'Connect to Aircall'
You’ll be taken to another screen to authorise your connection.
Set-up is complete!
What's next?
Surfboard will now download 12 months of historical ticket data from your Aircall account. This process will take 24-48hrs to complete, depending on the volume of tickets in your account.
Step 2: Set-up your forecast with ticket groups
Once this is complete, you next need to map your Aircall tickets to ticket groups.
A ticket group should represent the channels or queues agents work on in Aircall.
Navigate to Forecasts > Ticket groups.
Click the button labelled 'New ticket group'.
Name the ticket group. We recommend you use the same name you use in Aircall.
The 'real-time' and 'non real-time' setting does not apply to Aircall.
Select 'Aircall' from the connections dropdown.
You can now filter the tickets you want to include in this ticket group in the 'filter tickets' section. You can choose to filter tickets by:
cost
direction
duration
missed_call_reason
number_digits
number_id
status
tags
On the right hand side of the page, you will see a preview of the number of tickets you received in the last 7 days that match your filters. You can use this to check against data in your Aircall account to ensure you've set up the filters correctly.
Next, you need to enter the staffing parameters for this ticket group.
These inputs turn ticket volumes into a staffing requirement.Average conversation/interaction time: enter the average handle time for the entire conversation.
Concurrency: for phones, this should always be 1 as agents can only handle 1 call at a time.
Shrinkage: the is the % of scheduled time that's lost while agent's work on this ticket group. If you're not sure what you're shrinkage is, 30% is quite average across the industry.
Finally, you need to enter the service level or SLA that you're trying to achieve.
This a target % of all tickets that should meet your first response time target.
Your ticket group will now be set up and ready to use to forecast, track coverage and agent performance.
How to set-up agent tracking via Aircall
Step 1: Create the Webhook in Aircall
Log in to your Aircall dashboard (https://dashboard.aircall.io)
In the left sidebar, click Integrations & API
Note: if you do not see this option you likely do not have the correct permissions. Contact your admin to request them or have them peform the steps for you.
On the Integrations & API page, click the Discover integrations tab
Scroll down and select the Webhook option
Click Install integration
Give your integration a name e.g. Surfboard
Paste in the URL our team will have shared with you
Leave all events toggled on
Click Add webhook in the bottom right corner
Click Finish.
Step 2: Share your webhook details with Surfboard
You’ll now be taken back to the webhook settings for the webhook you just created, please copy & paste and share the following pieces of information with your Customer Success Manager:
The URL of the page e.g. "https://dashboard.aircall.io/integrations/webhook/webhook/12345"
The token shown in the General settings box
Our team will then finalise the connection and you'll be ready to start tracking performance!
Step 3: Link activities with ticket groups
In order to correctly mark agent activity as 'on-task' or 'off-task', you need to define which activities are 'service activities', i.e. agents should be working in Aircall at this time.
Navigate to the day view of the schedule
Open the activities sidebar by clicking “Add activities”
Select the activity you want to link to a forecast and click the edit icon ✏️
Toggle 'link to a forecast' on and select the relevant ticket group(s) from the dropdown
Set-up is complete!
You can now monitor agent's Aircall presence and activity in the real-time page and performance page.