165 lines
12 KiB
Plaintext
165 lines
12 KiB
Plaintext
AGENT MULTI-CAMPAIGN DIALING DOC Started: 2020-08-24 Updated: 2020-11-17
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NOTE: Requires VICIdial svn/trunk code revision 3284 or higher to work properly!!!
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NOTE: THIS FEATURE IS OPTIONAL, AND SHOULD ONLY BE CONFIGURED AFTER YOUR SYSTEM
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HAS BEEN INSTALLED AND TESTED!
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DESCRIPTION:
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In cases where a company wants the same group of agents to be able to outbound auto-dial on more than one campaign, you can configure your system to be able to operate in this way. Although it will often lead to a higher total dropped call rate than using separated campaigns or using separate lists within the same campaign and the list override settings to achieve unique configurations per list.
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First, a description of how to use List Overrides on multiple lists in a single campaign to achieve the goals of most of our clients that initially say they want to run multiple campaigns for the same group of agents. In the List Modification screen, you will see a series of settings that allow you to override campaign settings for calls placed from that list. For example, all of the following settings can be overriden at the list level:
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- Agent Script Override
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- Inbound Script Override
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- Inbound Drop Voicemail Override
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- Inbound After Hours Voicemail Override
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- Campaign CID Override
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- Answering Machine Message Override
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- Drop Inbound Group Override
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- Status Group Override
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- Web Form
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- Web Form Two
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- Web Form Three
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- No Agent Call URL
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- Transfer-Conf Number 1 Override
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- Transfer-Conf Number 2 Override
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- Transfer-Conf Number 3 Override
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- Transfer-Conf Number 4 Override
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- Transfer-Conf Number 5 Override
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- Default Transfer Group
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The above settings will allow calls to go out and back in with unique settings, allowing for unique calls paths and agent screens for each list. So if you have a set of services to perform on a customer list, you can define one per list and have the same group of agents call on all of those separate lists all in one single campaign.
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In some cases, like different agent spoken language skills, the above approach will not work, so you have to set up different campaigns(and lists) for each spoken language. In the example below we will detail each of the settings that need to be configured in Campaigns and In-Groups for this to work. We will use the example of an outbound appointment confirmation program that calls people who speak both English and Spanish and have agents who speak one or both of those languages.
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NOTE: The following instructions below assume that you already know how to set up and run an outbound auto-dialing campaign.
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1. Set up three campaigns:
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APPTENG(Appointments English)
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APPTSPA(Appointments Spanish)
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APPTAGNT(Appointments All Agents)
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2. Set up two lists:
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1101(Appointments English List), assigned to the APPTENG campaign
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1102(Appointments Spanish List), assigned to the APPTSPA campaign
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3. Set up two Inbound Groups to use as Drop In-Groups:
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DROP_APPT_ENG(Appointments English Drop InGroup)
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DROP_APPT_SPA(Appointments Spanish Drop InGroup)
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* RECOMMENDATIONS:
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- You may want to set the In-Group "Drop Call Seconds" to a lower number and send the call to a Call Menu if no agent is available
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4. Set the following settings on both the APPTENG & APPTSPA campaigns (these are your two outbound dialing campaigns)
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* Start by setting these campaigns up as you would to be normal outbound auto-dialing campaigns
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Dial Method: ADAPT_AVERAGE or RATIO
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Available Only Tally: Y
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Drop Call Seconds: -1
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Drop Action: IN_GROUP
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Drop Transfer Group: DROP_APPT_ENG(for the APPTENG campaign) or DROP_APPT_SPA(for the APPTSPA campaign)
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* RECOMMENDATIONS:
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- You may want to enable "Available Only Tally" or "Available Only Tally Threshold" to reduce the drop levels on these campaigns
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- Depending on the number of agents, you may want to set "Dial Level Difference Target" to a negative number to reduce drops
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- For high-contact lists, you should use a RATIO dial method and a Dial Level of '1'
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5. Set the following settings on the APPTAGNT campaign:
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Allow Inbound and Blended: Y
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Dial Method: RATIO
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Allow No-Hopper-Leads Logins: Y
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Allowed Inbound Groups: select both "DROP_APPT_ENG" & "DROP_APPT_SPA"
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6. Set the following settings on both the DROP_APPT_ENG & DROP_APPT_SPA inbound groups
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Welcome Message Filename: ---NONE---
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Play Welcome Message: NEVER
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No Delay Call Route: Y
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7. Set up two Users(which will be used for Remote Agents)
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User Number: 900000 & 910000
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8. Set up two Remote Agents
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User ID Start: 900000 & 910000
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Number of Lines: 1
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Server IP: <set to an active dialer with agents on your system>
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NOTE: On a multi-dialer cluster with multiple outbound campaigns, you will want to spread out Remote Agents across your active dialers
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External Extension: 8300
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Status: ACTIVE <You may want to leave this as INACTIVE until you are ready to dial>
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Campaign: assign one to the APPTENG campaign and the other to the APPTSPA campaign
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9. All agents will log into the "APPTAGNT" campaign and will select the "DROP_APPT_ENG" and/or "DROP_APPT_SPA" in-groups to take calls from when they log in, or managers can select those in-groups for the agents in the User Modify screen for those agents if they don't want their agents to have the ability to choose.
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HOW IT WORKS:
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When an outbound dialing campaign has the "Drop Call Seconds" set to '-1' and the "Drop Action" set to 'IN_GROUP' then the predictive dialing system will look for active agents logged in to other campaigns that have selected that campaign's "Drop Transfer Group" and will count them as agents in the outbound campaign, for the purposes of calculating how many calls to place outbound. For this reason, we recommend enabling the campaign "Available Only Tally" settings, to ensure too many calls are not being placed for agents already in phone calls since any agent with more than one campaign "drop in-group" selected will appear as more than one agent to the dialing system. The Remote Agents are used as a way of telling the system that the outbound dialing campaigns should be active, and when the "Drop Call Seconds" set to '-1' and the "Drop Action" set to 'IN_GROUP' then the first remote agent entry will be ignored for a campaign when the system calculates how many calls to place outbound.
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When "Drop Call Seconds" set to '-1' in a campaign, and a call is answered by a customer, the system will not even look for an agent in that campaign to send a call to, it will immediately drop the call to the selected drop in-group. With the In-Group "No Delay Call Route" set to 'Y', the system will attempt to send the call to an agent as fast as possible.
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THE PROBLEM OF "OVER-DIALING":
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When you allow a single agent to have multiple calls placed for them, there can always be a problem with "over-dialing", even when only using a single campaign. This issue is more complicated though when that same level of dialing is happening across multiple campaigns. At a minimum, the campaign "Available Only Tally" settings should be the first things you check to see if they are active. Beyond that, there really are not any simple solutions for it.
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One possible development option would be allowing for campaigns to have their dial levels set to a value below "1.0", which would not dial any calls unless there were more agents available to take calls from a specific campaign. There are multiple issues with making this work on the back-end that will need to be programmed around, as well as the problem that some campaigns which can't get above the 1.0 threshold to place a call with the number of agents logged-in not being able to place any calls at all. But if you aren't planning on having single agents dialing by themselves for a campaign at any point, this would be the simplest and quickest solution to try. This option would be 12 hours of development time.
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Another much more complex development option would be to add a new campaign dialing method "SHARED_RATIO" that would be specifically for shared agent campaigns that would operate somewhat like a round-robin system for shared campaign dialing. For instance, if only one agent is logged-in with dialing happening for that agent across 3 campaigns, each of those 3 campaigns would take turns dialing for that one agent. The number of calls would be calculated based on the number of agents that could take calls from each campaign, and the number of campaigns each agent is set to take calls from. This would be a very complex project to complete, but it would be the most efficient option with the best possibility for a balance between keeping agents on the phone and not dropping calls under all conditions(even single-agent dialing). This option would be 40 hours of development time.
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*********************** The following are notes for how this second option might work:
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How a "SHARED_RATIO" dial method would work:
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1. New code added to the AST_VDadapt.pl and AST_VDauto_dial.pl(and FILL) scripts that would for agents logged into shared-dialing campaigns, for dialing purposes only, rotate them among the campaigns that they are able to take calls from, while still allowing them to have calls from any of those campaigns sent to them any time they are available.
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2. Change the dialing algorithm, for campaigns with this dial method only, to use a count of calls placed by all shared campaigns on the system as a total, instead of only each campaign. This would prevent over-dialing as agents are rotated from dialing-campaign to dialing-campaign.
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3. The agent-dialing-campaign-rotation process would attempt to balance agents by time(round-robin-like) across the campaigns that they are assigned to take calls from.
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4. New database fields/tables to store the temporary dialing campaign designations for each agent and what other campaigns they had just been assigned to
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5. New debug Admin Utilities report that would show everything that is going on for shared campaigns in the process of agent rotation and shared ratio dialing
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Agent rotation steps: (see new database changes below for details on the DB storage of this data)
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- runs once every interval[2.5 sec, 15 sec, 1 minute] <- haven't decided this yet
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- for each agent, gather all campaigns they can dial for, and their current dial_campaign
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- delete from vicidial_agent_dial_campaigns any campaigns agent is no longer dialing for, update validate_time for others
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- set dial_campaign to ''(blank)
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- grab oldest vicidial_agent_dial_campaigns.dial_time campaign_id for each agent and update vicidial_live_agents.dial_campaign_id then update dial_time
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- at Timeclock-end-of-day, wipe out everything in vicidial_agent_dial_campaigns table older than 5 minutes and optimize table
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Shared campaigns outbound dialing steps:
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- gather all campaigns that are using a SHARED_ dial method, use that list to count current calls and calculate how many new calls can be placed for all shared campaigns
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- when counting for agents in the campaign, use the vicidial_live_agents.dial_campaign_id field
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- when allocating dials for each campaign, sort by oldest dial first(vicidial_campaigns.campaign_calldate) or by new ranking field(vicidial_campaigns.shared_dial_rank)
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DATABASE CHANGES:
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CREATE TABLE vicidial_agent_dial_campaigns (
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campaign_id VARCHAR(8),
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user VARCHAR(20),
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validate_time DATETIME,
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dial_time DATETIME,
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index (user),
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index (campaign_id)
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) ENGINE=MyISAM;
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CREATE UNIQUE INDEX vadc_key on vicidial_agent_dial_campaigns(campaign_id, user);
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ALTER TABLE vicidial_live_agents ADD dial_campaign_id VARCHAR(8) default '';
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ALTER TABLE vicidial_campaigns ADD shared_dial_rank TINYINT(3) default '0';
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ALTER TABLE vicidial_campaigns MODIFY dial_method ENUM('MANUAL','RATIO','ADAPT_HARD_LIMIT','ADAPT_TAPERED','ADAPT_AVERAGE','INBOUND_MAN','SHARED_RATIO','SHARED_ADAPT_HARD_LIMIT','SHARED_ADAPT_TAPERED','SHARED_ADAPT_AVERAGE') default 'MANUAL';
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ALTER TABLE system_settings ADD allow_shared_dial ENUM('0','1') default '0';
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