Business Advocate vs Dynamic Advocate 1

[DJPlaZma]

Ok, two-part question here.

1) What are the differences (advantages gained, additional features, etc) between Business Advocate and Dynamic Advocate?
2) Are one of these what I would need in order to have, essentially, "reserve agents"? By that I mean non-agent stations that ACD calls would be routed to if certain thresholds were reached on specificed VDNs?

Sorry if my question sounds a bit vague. Above (point #2) is how it was phrased to me. I've been working on these systems for about 10 years now, but it's always been as an implementor. Now that I work in a call-center environment I'm often surprised by things like this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[DJPlaZma]

Point of Clarification

It turns out that they're not talking about non-agent stations. We're talking about agents that may log in when they arrive, but don't get calls unless certain thresholds are reached. Sorry for the confusion...it was just pointed out to me.

 

[nohuhu]

DJPlaZma,

no confusion at all, advocate works exactly this way. but firstly i'd like to clarify the picture:
1. "business advocate" is the name of functional package, and "dynamic advocate" is just one part of the whole package. thus, it's not right to talk about one or other, if you buy business advocate package, you get them all. earlier (up to r10, afair) these packages were sold separately, i.e. you might buy business advocate without dynamic advocate. starting with r10, these are sold as one package.
2. business advocate is not a "higher level" of call center suite, it is, as i said, a bunch of functions packed and sold together.
3. there are different functions in this package, both passive and proactive. a good example of a passive function is predicted wait time algorithm -- it does nothing itself, it just provide you a more precise way to predict caller's waiting time. dynamic advocate, on the other hand, is a collection of proactive functions, i.e. functions that do something themselves, upon their settings of course. an example of such is auto agent reservation.

now down to the business: auto reserve agents function does exist is available in the business advocate package. it works in pretty simple (from user's point of view) way: every skill that uses this function has three states, normal, overload 1 and overload 2. one can set thresholds (expressed in the same way as ordinary service level), and upon reaching the first threshold skill will go from normal to overload 1, and upon reaching second threshold it will move to overload 2. having business advocate, one can assign agents to so-called reserve skills, with reserve skill level either 1 or 2. an agent can be assigned either to his/her primary skill OR to a reserve skill, i.e. you can't assign an agent to a skill as both primary and reserve agent. two reserve skill levels mean when this agent will start receiving calls for a particular skill: when it goes to overload 1 or overload 2.
to simplify a bit, imagine a hierarchical structure: there are first level pool of agents answering calls for a skill, they have this skill set as a primary (and it does not matter what skill level they have); second level pool that has this skill as reserve 1 -- they start answering calls ONLY when skill goes to overload 1 state (i.e. service level dropped to first threshold); and third level pool that has this skill as reserve 2 with the same logic.

another addition: business advocate is licensed per agent, but you don't have to buy a license for every agent in your call center, you can buy licenses only for those who need it. there are some complications with this but if talking about auto reserve agent function, you'll need to buy licenses for all reserve agents. the same as with ordinary call center, advocate limits the number of agents logged-in simultaneously, not agent login-ids with reserve skills.

hope this helps.

 

[DJPlaZma]

Dwalin,

Again, you have saved the day! You broke it down and explained it in plain English. I TRULY appreciate you shedding light on this for me.

Couple this with the document I found and I'm armed for bear.

Again, Thank You. Your input, as I've seen so often on here, proves to be invaluable.

-DJ PlaZma

 

[nohuhu]

DJPlaZma,

no problem, you're welcome. )