Contact Center question

[argent3993]

I'm running a BCM450 Release 5 with Contact Center.

We have an odd business case - high demand of product each Monday with low available supply. To prevent people from calling in at 3am (yes - 3am!) and getting the first spot in the call queue, we simply wanted to play a message and then disconnect the caller. It works most of the time, but every now and then it gives us fits.

Here are the details - we have configured a very basic skillset. When running in night mode, it plays a recording and then disconnects the caller. When running in day mode, it connects the caller to 1 of 2 available agents (or plays a recording if both agents are busy and loops until an agent is available).

On occasion, though - it seems as if Contact Center ignores the Day/Night mode settings. I've observed calls ringing at the agents' desks - when both are logged in but in "busy" mode (F908). I've verified that the skillset is in night mode and both agents are "busy", yet a call or two will somehow sneak through.

A slight different example - I came in to work this morning, and even though the skillset was in night mode (play recording then disconnect), there were 10 calls lined in up in the queue - some of which had been queued for over an hour. Logging in and becoming available wouldn't pass the calls through - they were stuck in limbo.

Rebooting the phone system clears up the issue, so as a short-tem fix, I've scheduled the BCM to reboot early every morning. This seems a harsh solution, but does anybody have any other suggestions?

Thanks...

 

[curlycord]

What about having another table answer lines at that time, disable 0 and give only one option Path 1 which is business hours.....of the Q and then disconnects

=----(((((((((()----=
curlycord

http://www.curlycord.com

 

[argent3993]

We're not using the Auto Attendant at all - the call is automatically routed to the call center queue (callers use a DID specifically dedicated for this process). The agents toggle from night mode to day mode 1st thing Monday morning - then toggle back to night mode when supply is exhausted (usually Monday late AM but it could run into the afternoon). The "night mode" greeting basically says no more supply is available and to try again next week.

Since I'm dealing with variable hours (fixed start-time, variable end-time), I can't use fixed, pre-programmed hours. AA won't help, will it? I already have the night routing table in the queue set to play the greeting then disconnect. For whatever reason, once every couple of months the system burps and things don't work as designed. The rest of the time things work great.

 

[snd1234]

Late to the party. Here is a solution we use at my company.

We run telethons for fundraising about 4 times per year for maybe 1-2 weeks at a time. During periods of the day that we have staff available to answer phones (8a-9p) we have calls to the DID route into the call center. For periods where no one is available to answer the phone we have them route to the autoattendant to be answered by a recording.

Would something similar work for you if your autoattendent just played a message one time and hung up on them?

Because the way we do it is boil it all down to a button on a particular phone that when pressed triggers the system to route callers into the contact center and when not pressed routes them to the autoattendant. I can explain the specific process but basically it's a ring group that switches the target line between the AA's System DN and the CC's System DN. It works really well for what we're doing because it gives us complete control over when calls go to the CC and when calls go to the AA.

Sounds like your system works pretty well as-is except for those random failures so I guess the question you have to ask yourself is would something like that (manual control from an extension) work better than automated control based on a predefined schedule? I can give the nuts and bolts of the configuration if this way sounds better.

 

[cook1082]

Make sure it has the lasest patches. Thats the first thing to start with.

 

[argent3993]

Yes - we're fully patched on R5. The ring group solution sounds interesting, but I'm not sure if it will help. It's pretty frustating - the "night" mode on the call center skillset has 2 basic steps - force play recording and then disconnect.

I'm just not sure why a call will occasionally sneak through - or why I can look at the BCM monitor while night mode is active and see one or two calls queued for the skillset even though they should have been disconnected. I can see other calls come in, hit the recording, and be disconnected - but the rogue calls remain.

From conversations from a couple candid customers, they say they constantly press random buttons on the phone while the recording is playing to try and break out and sit in the queue until it becomes active. Since AA is not currently running/answering calls - and we don't have an overflow mode defined - I don't think there's anything that could trigger that, but who am I to say?

I've also consider going to R6 - but not sure if that will help.

As a related question - does anyone know of a way to execute (via ssh or ???) a way to disconnect all calls in a skillset - a "clear all lines"-type option? Disabling the skillset doesn't do it (from what I can tell) - it just prevents any new incoming calls from reaching the skillset.