The timer starts regardless of whether the customer has finished describing the fault location or whether the agent has noted the exact substation reference. Agents learn to drop the details and hit save before the window closes.
During the recent substation trip that hit 340 households, the lost notes meant the field crews received only generic "no power" tickets instead of the street-by-street impact the callers had supplied.
The vendor had sold the feature as a way to protect average handle time targets. In practice it removed the only free-text field available once call volume crossed the daily threshold.
Supervisors cannot extend the timer because the permission sits with the workforce management module, which treats every extension request as a performance flag. The ops team therefore stopped asking.
Three months of these truncated records now sit in the CRM. The demand forecasting model treats the outage as a uniform event rather than a clustered set of addresses, so the next storm produces the same scramble.
The centre's service design lead has started printing paper templates for agents to scribble on during the wrap window, then transcribe later. That workaround is invisible to the dashboards the board sees.
The fix is not another widget. It is removing the hard timer from any call that carries an active incident code and letting the agent close the record when the context is captured, not when the clock hits zero.