CompuTools Teleplex Blog

A customer recently ask why the Call Log times differ from the Agent Activity times.  The particular system is used for predictive dialing, and agents are connected via virtual extensions to another PBX.  The extensions are set for auto-answer, but the agents are not pre-connected to Teleplex.

The tTotal field in the Call Log table is the total call duration in seconds from the time that the call was answered until the call has been completely released.  The following should be noted:

• A dialer call can be connected to a customer for up to two seconds before it is transferred to an agent.  (This is part of the prediction algorithm, and if no agent is available after two seconds the call will be abandoned.)
• tTotal also includes the time required to connect the customer side of the call to the agent.  Transfer of a pre-connected call is instantaneous, whereas in this case, a new call must be made each time.  This call setup requires a few hundred milliseconds.

The tTalk field in Call Log is the time that an agent is actually talking to the customer, and excludes hold time.

The Agent Activity table contains a number of fields such as “BusyACD”, and “BusyOutbound”.  These fields contain agent state times, and are distinct from call times in the Call Log.

For dialer calls, the flow and timings are as follows:

• When the dialer has a call for an agent, Teleplex automatically puts the agent into the “busy outbound” state.
• Next, Teleplex calls the agent. As mentioned above, this requires a few hundred milliseconds, during which time tTotal and BuyOutbound are increasing.
• If the application does not answer the call immediately (e.g., it first accesses a database), tTotal and the BusyOutbound values will increase, but not the tTalk value because the agent cannot talk yet.  (For maximum performance and minimum delay, applications should use Teleplex’s screen pop feature to pre-fetch the required customer data in advance of making the call.)
• When the application answers the call Teleplex connects the customer to the agent, thus beginning the tTalk period.

Agent State times are therefore never equal to the tTotal or tTalk times.  The tTalk values should be close to the agent state times, but will always be slightly less because they indicate entirely different things.

Note: As of Teleplex 3.64, various times in the Call Log table are now stored as floating point values. Therefore, some of the values will now be closer to the Agent Activity values, but as mentioned above will never be exactly the same.