I’m building a structured call-capture flow for a missed-call lead capture system and need help with no-response handling.
What I’m trying to achieve:
When a caller doesn’t respond at a given step, I want the agent to deliver a custom closing message before ending the call - something like “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. Please call back if you need help. Goodbye.” - rather than the call ending abruptly with silence.
What I’ve tried:
Set “End Call on Silence” slider to its maximum (30 minutes) at the agent level
Added a no-response transition out of the capture node, routing to a dedicated “Polite Closing” node containing the custom message
Added additional intermediary nodes as fallback paths
What’s actually happening:
The agent re-asks itself based on the configured reminder count. After the reminders are exhausted (around 30 seconds total), the call ends automatically - well before the “End Call on Silence” threshold I configured. My no-response transition never fires, because the reminder loop terminates the call before any transition is evaluated.
It seems Retell’s reminder mechanism has a hardwired auto-end after reminders are exhausted, which overrides custom transition logic.
My questions:
Is there a way to disable the automatic call-end after the reminder count is exhausted, so that my custom transition can fire instead?
Alternatively, is there a way to route the call to a custom closing node after reminders are exhausted, before the agent terminates?
Is there an undocumented setting or workaround that allows a custom spoken message before silence-based termination?
If this isn’t currently supported, I’d appreciate any guidance on the best approach to handle no-response scenarios gracefully.
Happy to share my agent ID or specific node configurations if useful.
Yeah, hit this one myself. The reminder loop overrides your transition every time.
Easiest workaround I’ve found: use the final reminder as your closing message. Set reminder count to 2 or 3 and make the last reminder text your goodbye (“Sorry I can’t hear you, please call back if you need help. Goodbye.”). When the reminders exhaust and the call ends, that’s the last thing the caller hears. No transition needed.
Not as clean as a proper “no response” node, but it gets you the polite hangup you’re after.
Thanks for your reply and the detailed explanation.
I would really appreciate if you provide a bit more clarification on this as I don’t seem to find any options in the Agent settings to adjust reminder count or the final reminder message (only reminder frequency).
Or do you mean just adding this in the Agent’s Global prompt?
Hey, dug into this a bit more. There’s no documented way to override the auto-end, but here’s an undocumented workaround worth a try. I haven’t tested this one myself, so treat it as an experiment.
Set up a custom end_call function. In your prompt, instruct the agent to call that function once the reminder has fired twice (or whatever count suits you). On the custom function, enable Talk While Waiting and set the phrase to your closing message, something like “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. Please call back if you need help. Goodbye.”
Talk While Waiting is normally used to fill silence with a short line like “let me look that up for you”, but here it lets you speak your closing message before the call ends. So your function handles the goodbye rather than Retell’s built-in auto-end.
Apologies for the delayed response and thanks so much for your reply.
I like your idea too but also what I actually did and found to be working is just adding the instructions on what do incase of no-response in global prompt and and also in each node.
So like you said “In your prompt, instruct the agent to call that function once the reminder has fired twice (or whatever count suits you).” but instead of instructing the agent to call a function we can just instruct it to do what we cant the function block to be doing.
It is working for me most of the time now (although sometimes it does hallucinate and skip).
Anyways thanks for the discussion it really helped me was setting reminder count 2 reminders in “x” seconds and adding instructions everywhere.
Would be great if Retell adds more features for customization.
No worries, and that is a cleaner solution than mine, nice work. Putting it in the global prompt plus each node makes sense, and the occasional hallucination is the trade-off until Retell ships a proper no-response setting. Hopefully they will. Thanks for sharing what worked.