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.
If you want to disable Caller ID display for outbound calls you can create an LCR rule as illustrated in the screen below. This example is for NTT (Japan):
When a digit string (“[0-9]“) of length 9 to 11 digits (“{9,11}”) is dialed for a regular outbound call, Teleplex adds “184″ to the original dialed number. This enables NTT’s “iyayo” feature, which suppresses Caller ID display for the current call. (“Iyayo” is a word play on an alternate pronunciation of 1-8-4 that roughly means “That’s gross. No way!”) . To enable this behavior for Predictive Dialer calls, you must also enable “Use LCR” in the Campaign Manager screen for campaigns where you wish to apply this behavior.
For other countries you can achieve the same thing by adjusting the the Dial Pattern and the “Translates To” settings. To block Caller ID In the United States, first dial “*67″ (instead of “184″ above). Similarly, to block Caller ID in the United Kingdom and Ireland, first dial “141″.
A good reason for wanting to block the Caller ID on outbound system is so people won’t call back into a predictive dialer line. However, In the United States (and perhaps other places) it is illegal for telemarketers to block or provide false Caller ID information. Therefore, a better way of dealing with this is to set the “Display Address” in the LCR setting to so that the Caller ID shows the number of your inbound lines.
For more information on LCR rules, please refer to the “Teleplex System Manager Guide“.
Teleplex CallBrowser installation is straightforward, but can be tedious if you are installing it on a large number of machines in a call center.
To simplify this, you can pass a number of default settings to use in CallBrowser’s login profiles via Setup.exe’s command line. Possible parameters are:
- SERVER=teleplex_server. Sets the default Teleplex server name or IP address.
- EXTENSION=extension_number. Sets the extension number to use.
- PROTOCOL=protocol_name. Sets the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) protocol to use, This is typically “ncacn_ip_tcp”, indicating TCP/IP protocol.
- ENDPOINT=endpoint. This is a protocol-specific parameter. For “ncacn_ip_tcp”, you typically set the endpoint to “7100”, which is a TCP/IP port.
- FTPPROFILENAME=profile_name. Call Centers typically set up the ACDs and Dialer campaigns agents can login to in single data file, so the possibilities don’t need to be set on every machine. This parameter sets the name of the file containing those profiles.
- FTPPROFILESERVER=ftp_server. If you are loading login profiles from an FTP server this specifies
the name or IP address of the FTP server.
The best way to use these command lines settings is to create a batch file in a shared directory, and run Setup.exe from the batch file. The batch file might contain a line something like this (the line is split below for readability):
Setup SERVER=Teleplex1
EXTENSION=Site.%1
PROTOCOL=ncacn_ip_tcp
ENDPOINT=7100 FTPPROFILENAME=Profiles.dat
FTPPROFILESERVER=ftpserver
Notice the “%1”. This is a parameter to the batch file itself, and should be set to the extension number. If the batch file name is, for example, “go.bat”, you would install CallBrowser for the machine at extension “2703” with the following command:
\\share\go 2703
You can then quickly finish the installation simply by pressing Enter several times.
