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Agent first-week onboarding journey

This guide follows a brand-new agent, call them Sam, through a first week of contact-center shifts on Orbit, from the browser at a desk. It is written from the agent’s chair: every step is something you do yourself during week one, and everything your admin does beforehand is linked rather than repeated. If your first week happens on a phone instead of a desk, the matching journey is Mobile app first-shift onboarding.

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Before the first shift: what your admin provisions

Three things exist before Sam’s day one, all set up by an admin or supervisor. You do none of them yourself, but they are the first things to check when something is missing on the first morning:
  1. A softphone login. Browser softphone credentials or an extension for the built-in softphone, minted per the browser softphone guide.
  2. Queue membership and skills. The queues that ring to you, and the skill certifications that route specialist calls your way, per the voice queues guide and skill certifications.
  3. A roster. The first week’s shifts, breaks, and time off, published per the first-roster scheduling guide.
When all three are in place, the rest of the week is yours to run.

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Day 1, morning: profile, presence, and one loop call

  1. Set up your profile. Open the /me area of the dashboard and fill in what teammates and supervisors should see: display name, photo, and your voice preferences, per the profile and voice-preferences guide.
  2. Learn your presence states. Your ACD presence is the switch that decides whether queues ring to you: available, on a call, wrapping up, or an aux state such as break or training. Read the agent presence lifecycle once, and keep the aux codes guide open during week one. When you step away, pick the code that matches why; the same codes feed your adherence reporting, so an honest aux code is also a correct one.
  3. Register the browser softphone and grant the mic. Follow the registration steps in the browser softphone guide, and when the browser asks for microphone permission on the dashboard origin, allow it. A denied mic is the most common first-day failure, and it is silent: the call connects and the customer hears nothing.
  4. Close one loop. Place one test call, a teammate’s extension or your own mobile, then have it returned. One call in each direction proves registration, mic, and speaker before a customer is involved.

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Day 1, live: working a queue call

  1. Answer. Go available and the first queue call rings your softphone with the caller context your admin configured for the queue.
  2. Hold, transfer, or conference when the call needs help. Put the caller on hold while you look something up, blind-transfer when the call is not yours, and warm-transfer or conference a teammate in when it is yours but needs a second voice. The mechanics of all three are in the conference and transfer guide.
  3. Take the AI handoff when one arrives. When an AI agent decides a conversation needs a human, the call reaches your softphone carrying the conversation so far. What the handoff brings and how to continue from it is covered in the AI-to-human handoff guide; when a handoff misbehaves, the handoff runbook is its troubleshooting companion.
  4. Wrap up before you go available again. Ending the call drops you into wrap-up: pick the required wrap-up code and the disposition tags your admin made mandatory, per wrap-up codes and call disposition tags. While you are in wrap-up the queue holds further calls, so the code you pick is also the honest record of what the call was.

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Days 2-3: the first Inbox and Team Chat shifts

Voice is one half of the week. The other half starts on days two and three:
  1. Work a first Inbox shift. The Inbox is the unified queue of customer conversations your admin configured per the inbox setup guide; your side of it is answering. Start with macros and canned responses so a first reply takes one click instead of ten, and keep an eye on pending replies, the queue of conversations waiting on you specifically.
  2. Learn which presence is which. Your Team Chat status and your ACD presence answer different questions: one tells teammates how reachable you are in chat, the other decides whether contact-center work rings to you. The Team Chat first-channel guide walks through joining your first channels and setting the status that matches your shift.

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End of week 1: your side of the quality loop

  1. Acknowledge or appeal your first evaluation. A sample of your calls is scored against your organization’s scorecard, and the evaluations made about you live on your scorecard, per the agent scorecard guide. Acknowledge the evaluation there, or appeal through the same screen when a score looks wrong.
  2. Rehearse a flagged skill in Practice Studio. When an evaluation flags a skill, run a roleplay session against it before the next live call, per the Practice Studio roleplay guide.
  3. Read your own standing. Your own card, points, badges, and rank, is the agent view of the leaderboard (GET /quality/gamification/me), computed against the same board your supervisor runs (POST /quality/gamification/leaderboard), so your rank always matches what your supervisor sees. Reading the board and what moves you up it is the quality leaderboard guide.

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Mobile shifts

When a shift happens away from the desk, the phone-side equivalent of this week (install, sign in, push, first calls, first Inbox conversations) is Mobile app first-shift onboarding. Same queues, same call log, same Inbox; a different device.

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Stuck?

The four classic first-week failures, and where each is resolved: