Call Spikes
The portal continuously watches each company's call volume against its historical pattern. When something looks abnormal, you and the affected supervisor are notified.
Reviewing call spikes
Click Call Spikes (opens in a new tab) in the sidebar. You'll see a table of detected anomalies, with:
- Affected company
- When the spike occurred
- The deviation magnitude (how far above or below normal)
- Status (open, acknowledged, resolved)
Click into any row to see the underlying data — actual call volume vs. expected, recent calls during the spike window, and links into the calls themselves.
Investigating a spike
A typical investigation flow:
- Open the spike detail.
- Look at the calls during the spike window — are they legitimate (real customers) or noise (one persistent robocaller, accidental flood from a marketing test, etc.)?
- Check whether the affected company recently launched a new ad campaign or service.
- Cross-reference with operational events — was Five9 having issues at that time?
- If real → notify the supervisor responsible so they can adjust staffing.
- If noise → consider blocking the source (handled outside the portal in Five9) and document the cause.
- Mark the spike as acknowledged or resolved when investigation is complete.
Drops vs. spikes
The detector flags both spikes (volume sharply up) and drops (volume sharply down). Drops can indicate:
- The customer's ad spend was paused
- Their inbound number is broken or rerouted
- Five9 is having an issue routing calls to that campaign
Drops are often more urgent than spikes — investigate them quickly. A silent phone is worse than a noisy one.
How forecasts and spikes relate
The forecasting feature predicts expected volume; the spike detection compares actual to expected. When you see a flagged spike, the forecast view shows you the gap visually.
If a customer's actual volume regularly diverges from forecast in a consistent direction, the model may need re-tuning for that customer's pattern. Note such cases for engineering review.
Spike severity rubric
A loose guide to triage urgency:
| Deviation | Likely meaning | Urgency |
|---|---|---|
| Drop ≥50% during business hours | Routing/system issue | Highest — investigate immediately |
| Spike ≥3× normal during business hours | Real campaign or PR moment | High — confirm staffing |
| Spike outside business hours | Spam wave or robocaller | Medium — investigate, may need to block |
| Drop ≥30% lasting many hours | Ad pause or seasonality | Medium — confirm with customer |
| Single-hour deviation | Noise or one-off event | Low — usually self-resolves |
Coordinating with supervisors
Most spike alerts are best handled by the supervisor who owns the affected customer relationship. Your role as admin:
- Investigate technical causes (Five9, S3, sync)
- Tune the model when it consistently misfires
- Escalate to engineering when it's not a customer-side issue
Next
- System Operations — when the cause is technical
- On-call Playbook — incident response