Callers in queue sometimes don't get announcements 1

[captnamo]

Greetings! I'm an accountant turned telecom guy morphed to part-time AACC guy. I don't script.

One of our Contact Center (CC) applications is our IT Service Desk. All callers get an initial greeting (Your call may be recorded . . . .) and then caller goes to ready agent or to queue. If they land in the queue, they get an announcement that indicates "all agents are busy, stay on the line" and then the call goes to music on hold. Other messages play after 45 secs. of wait time.

We have other little pockets of call center (District Court - 3 locations, Friend of the Court, etc.) installed and scripted by AT&T and, for the most part, have been working fine for several years. We've had occasional recurring issue of callers going right to music on hold when they go to queue and not hearing either the initial greeting nor the secondary or any of the other greetings. But, try it later and it's working just fine.

Does anyone know if this would be expected behavior if all the voice ports on the Call Pilot voicemail system (which supplies the greetings) were busy for some reason? Anyone have any other theories as to why this might happen?

Thanks in advance for your wisdom and insight.

 

[yyrkroon]

Yes, if the voiceports are busy, you can expect this kind of experience.

Voice services acting flaky also provide this kind of behavior...if you don't do anything and it works again then you can rule out the voice services issue.

More than likely, not enough voice ports. How many give ivr port and access ports do you have available? You can see this under configuration/voiceports in aacc.

 

[captnamo]

I have 12 voice ports serving 6 queues (3 District Court locations, Service Desk, Friend of the Court and a Public Health Clinic). They all show "Acquired Login."

Thinking about this, it seems to me that I must be able to check for busy ports in Call Pilot somewhere when this happens again to confirm our theory. I'll do some checking. Any other suggestions?

 

[captnamo]

Looks like Call Pilot has 24 ports, so the other 12 must be for voicemail use.

 

[mikeyb123]

From memory you should also be able to run a historic IVR report? (been a while since I've worked on AACC/ccms) that should tell you if you are hittng all ports

It's not getting any smarter out there. You have to come to terms with stupidity, and make it work for you.

 

[captnamo]

I wish that expensive program AACC or CallPilot could just email an alert when voice ports aren't available.

I ran the Historical IVR Voice Port Statistics Report and I can't see that it's really telling me anything helpful.

 

[StanleySteamer]

captnamo - Take a look at the Configuration > Global Settings.
The setting for "Maximum Ports With Queuing For Broadcast".
From the NTP:
"Ensure that you correctly configure the value of the Maximum
Ports With Queuing For Broadcast option in the Global Settings window on
the client. If you configure this value to be greater than the actual number of
ports in the IVR ACDDN, call processing suspends at this statement even if
no ports are free for the call. The calls queue until a connection to the port
becomes free. However, if you configure this value equal to or less than the
number of ports in the IVR ACD-DN, the caller only hears the broadcast if a
port with free capacity is available to connect the call (if all ports are used,
the call skips this statement and goes to the next statement in the script). "

The recommended setting is the number of ports + 1, so in your case that would be 13.

 

[captnamo]

Interesting!!!

Maximum Ports With Queuing For Broadcast: 11

I'm changing to 13 to see what happens. Can always change it back!

 

[captnamo]

All seemed to have been working ok.

Well, now we have an instance of the calls just ringing and not being answered and queued when no agent is available. Tried it again and now it is working fine.

Anyone have an idea what that means?

And on another call, when second intercept greeting plays ("Please stay on the line...."), greeting didn't play and music didn't come back.

Old Hungarian Proverb: Technology is a wonderful thing, when it works like it's supposed to.

 

[yyrkroon]

If you configure this value to be greater than the actual number of ports in the IVR ACDDN, call processing suspends at this statement even if no ports are free for the call. The calls queue until a connection to the port becomes free.

your call is queuing, waiting for an available port.

 

[captnamo]

Ok, thanks! So, I either get more ports or be happy that calls are queueing and that it doesn't happen more often. =o)