Webex Contact Center RONA and agent state handling

Verified 2026-09-05 · 48 claims · sources tier 2 · 2 disputed

Also known as Engaged Other, Granular Agent state control, Idle Aux Code, Immediate RONA, Pending Idle, RONA, Reroute on No Answer, Ring No Answer, Route on no answer.

RONA occurs when an agent does not accept a voice call, chat, email, or social messaging conversation request within the configured administrative time frame 22. When this occurs, the contact request is removed from the agent desktop and returned to the queue to be assigned to the next available agent, while the agent's status changes from Available to Idle 19​10.

How RONA works

Cisco's documentation expands the acronym RONA 4 different ways across 4 articles: Route on no answer, Ring No Answer, Re-route On No Answer, and Reroute on No Answer 23. An agent cannot change their own state to RONA manually; it is assigned only by the system 14. RONA functions as a timed agent state in its own right, with desktop state timers running for available, RONA, and administrator-configured idle states 32. The state transition table records a transition from Engaged to RONA when an offered contact request is not accepted within the specified duration 32.

When RONA occurs, a desktop popover presents 2 options: Go To Idle, which applies the administrator-configured default idle reason, and Go To Available, which restores the agent to accepting contacts 38. Inaction on the contact request popover once the timer lapses drives the automatic transition to Idle 31. After RONA fires, the agent must manually return their state to Available before any further voice, chat, email, or social messaging requests will be offered 11.

RONA handling is isolated to the channel on which the timeout occurred 33. If an agent misses a telephony call without setting themselves idle, only the telephony channel transitions to Idle, and the agent remains Available on other channels like chat or email 33. A worked example from Cisco demonstrates that RONA can fire on the email channel while the agent is actively engaged on a voice call, displaying the RONA popover and resetting the state timer when the agent selects Go To Idle or Go To Available 13.

System idle auxiliary codes and related failure states

The platform includes a system-assigned idle auxiliary code named RONA, indicating an agent timed out without responding after call delivery 27. Other system-assigned idle auxiliary codes handle different delivery failures and conditions 15​36:

• Channel_Failure: Indicates temporary network failures or unknown errors preventing call delivery; the system retries up to 3 more times and sets the agent to Idle only if all attempts fail 15.
• Agent_Busy: Indicates the destination device was busy and prevented delivery 36.
• Agent_Declined: Indicates the agent declined a contact while occupied with another activity 36.
• Agent_Unavailable: Indicates the device for the agent's dial number is offline or unreachable 36.
• Invalid_Number: Indicates the dial number entered at sign-in is invalid 36.

Cisco states that an enhanced sign-in process with input validation reduces RONA occurrences by preventing sign-ins with invalid or unassigned dial numbers or extensions 21. In addition, the system monitors the WebRTC service following sign-in; if WebRTC fails, the agent's state automatically changes to Idle so calls are not routed to an unreachable endpoint 48. If WebRTC disconnects during an active voice session while the agent is Available on voice, the system sets the voice state to Idle and disables both the individual voice toggle and the option to set all channels as available until WebRTC reconnects 47.

Configured timeouts

Setting a RONA timeout in Control Hub is a documented prerequisite for digital channel setup, defining the duration an agent has to answer before the contact returns to the queue and the agent transitions to RONA 43. Timeouts are configured under Services > Contact Center > Tenant settings > Desktop in the RONA timeouts section, where values in seconds are set per channel 16.

Sources disagree on the email RONA timeout default: one settings table specifies an email default of 300 seconds with a range of 1 to 6000 seconds 42, whereas sources disagree because Cisco's agent-states article states that the maximum time to accept a voice call request is 18 seconds and 30 seconds for a digital channel request, naming chat, email, and social messaging together 12.

Agent routing and operational states

Contacts across voice, chat, email, social, and campaign interactions are routed to an agent only when the agent is in the Available state 35. Reserved is a temporary state where the system has selected an agent and is offering the request, lasting until the agent accepts, rejects, or the request times out 39. telephonic connections move the agent from Reserved to Engaged 39, whereas a campaign agent on a reservation call remains displayed as Reserved rather than transitioning to Engaged 2.

Engaged Other indicates the agent is busy on another channel and their multimedia profile restricts them from accepting a new interaction 20. Under an exclusive profile, an agent is marked Engaged on the active channel and Engaged Other on all other channels; under a blended real-time profile, only 1 real-time channel is restricted at a time 20.

If an agent selects an idle state while Engaged or in Wrap-Up, the agent enters Pending Idle, which immediately stops new interaction routing on that channel and moves the agent to the selected idle state once the interaction and wrap-up end 37. An agent on chat, email, or social messaging can transition directly to Not Ready while engaged, bypassing Pending Idle, whereas an agent on voice cannot 5. A supervisor can remotely sign an agent out when that agent is in the Available or Idle state with no active conversations 40.

Supervisor monitoring surfaces the states Monitoring and Monitoring Paused, which are not supported within the Agent Desktop 3. Furthermore, the agent states documentation defines consult-specific call control states—including Consult Requested, Consulting, Consult on Hold, and Conference—and contains no transfer state and never uses the word transfer 4. The agent states documentation also does not discuss call recording 1.

When an outdial call concludes, the Agent Available After Outdial setting governs state transitions: if set to Yes, the agent transitions to Available even if the call was placed while Idle; if set to No, the agent transitions to Idle 9. During consults, if a consulted agent fails to answer or has a malfunctioning device, the system changes that consulted agent's state to Idle and returns a consult failure message to the initiating agent 18. Consult calls to an entry point or dial number routed to a capacity-based team are unsupported and fail for both direct consults and outbound-initiated consults 17.

Cisco states that from 30 April 2026 through 29 October 2026 (a 6-month period), Control Hub provides a tenant-level administrative toggle to enable or disable granular agent state control, after which per-channel control becomes generally available 25. Keeping the granular agent state control toggle off during this window is what allows continued use of Webex Workforce Optimization 26.

Diagnosing RONA conditions

Cisco identifies 2 common, non-exhaustive conditions that place an agent into a RONA state: RONA after a ring event, and immediate RONA 46. In a RONA after ring event, the call reaches the endpoint over SIP and the endpoint answers with a 180 Ringing message, but no off-hook 200 OK is received, so after the configured RONA time the system moves the agent into a nonresponsive state, where the agent's phone rings and nobody picks it up 8. In an immediate RONA, the system finds a problem while presenting the call or task to the agent's endpoint and moves the agent into a RONA state at once, with documented causes being a system or agent endpoint problem, or the agent having entered the dial number in the wrong Dialed Number or Extension tab 30.

For a RONA after ring event, Cisco asks administrators to determine whether the phone rings or desktop errors appear, whether failures are site-specific, whether dial numbers were recently added, the failure percentage, dependence on area codes, and whether the issue is reproducible on demand 45. Administrators should collect the ANI or session identifier, exact timestamps, agent details, screenshots, and the Agent Desktop error report generated via Ctrl+Shift+2 45.

Webex Contact Center lacks an out-of-the-box Analyzer report to comprehensively track and categorize RONA occurrences, which Cisco states complicates root-cause analysis 34. To address this, Cisco provides 4 importable custom Analyzer reports: Immediate RONA, RONA between 3 seconds and 18 seconds, RONA after the default 18-second timer expiry, and a consolidated report containing the first 3 as modules 24. The Immediate RONA report is analyzed by exporting events and filtering for instances where both Value of Activity State and Value of Next Activity State equal connect 29. Cisco calculates the total count of immediate RONAs in this report by dividing the total count of session identifiers by 4 28.

See also

• Webex Contact Center queues teams and routing strategies
• Webex Contact Center Analyzer and reporting model
• Webex Contact Center Agent Desktop and widgets
• What a supervisor can do and what is recorded of it
• Webex Contact Center workforce optimization and recording

Applicability

Across the claims in this article, the evidence covers Cisco Webex Contact Center across cloud deployments, verified as of 2026-09-05. The granular agent state control administrative toggle window runs from 30 April 2026 to 29 October 2026 in Control Hub 25.

What remains uncertain

This article reflects the cited evidence; specific operational behaviors are not covered by any claim in this article:

• Sources disagree on whether the email RONA default is 30 or 300 seconds 42​12.
• What happens when a Queue To Agent preferred agent RONAs is not covered by any claim in this article.
• Whether a RONA contact keeps its priority and queue position when returned to the queue is not covered by any claim in this article.
• Why capacity-based teams cannot detect redirection on no answer is not covered by any claim in this article.
• What happens when the granular agent state control toggle window closes on 29 October 2026 is not covered by any claim in this article.
• Whether a callback that RONAs is rescheduled dropped or requeued differently is not covered by any claim in this article.
• Whether an unanswered outdial or campaign contact produces a RONA is not covered by any claim in this article.
• Whether an administrator can force an arbitrary agent state rather than only sign out is not covered by any claim in this article.

WarmTransfer. (2026, September 5). Webex Contact Center RONA and agent state handling. WarmTransfer. https://warmtransfer.net/knowledge/webex-cc-rona-agent-state

@misc{warmtransfer-webex-cc-rona-agent-state,
  title  = {Webex Contact Center RONA and agent state handling},
  author = {{WarmTransfer}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://warmtransfer.net/knowledge/webex-cc-rona-agent-state},
  note   = {Verified 2026-09-05}
}