Call Spikes
The portal continuously watches each company's call volume against its historical pattern. When a company receives unusually more calls than expected, subscribed admins are notified.
Reviewing call spikes
Open Call Spikes (opens in a new tab) from the Dashboard widget link. The page calculates spike windows from recording history and lets you filter by:
- Company name
- Company
- Date range
- Only anomalies
Each result shows the actual volume, expected volume, upper threshold, lower threshold, and z-score for that time window. Use View calls to open the affected company's Calls view for the same date.
The Dashboard call-spike widget also shows the current detection window, actual volume, expected volume, and upper threshold.
Investigating
A typical investigation flow:
- Open the Call Spikes page or the notification link.
- Look at the calls for 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Single-window 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