Ghost Calls/Phantom Calls

[harryhoudini66]

What would you say is an acceptable percentage for this calls? I understand that even with Abandoned Call Search, it will not solve the problem and only reduces the instances.

We take about 5000 calls daily and have about 80 agents total. They each indicate getting about 5-8 calls each day.

 

[nohuhu]

harryhoudini66,

the percent differs between customers, but usually if the number of abandoned calls does not exceed 3-4% of total acd calls, we close our eyes on that. in your case, 80 agents * 8 abandoned calls = 640 calls total, that's about 13% of the total number. that's a little bit high in my opinion. however, as i said it depends on your specific conditions. some of our customers consider a day with 30% of abandoned calls a happy day because usually they get 50-60%...

 

[harryhoudini66]

In this case though do these count against abondend calls? I mean, they did technicaly reach an agent. They even queued up.

I am also worried if the problem may be something else. When I listened to the recordings, you can hear the call connect.

 

[nohuhu]

harryhoudini66,

if a call reached an agent but wasn't answered, it counts against abandoned. if it was answered but then disconnected, it counts against answered. so technically you don't have abandoned calls in this case. you need to trace and debug the system to determine if these were really abandoned calls, i.e. it was a caller who hanged up or there's some technical problem and calls are disconnected either on your side or on the telco side.

 

[harryhoudini66]

Thanks. I will look in to this then. The recording for these calls show CTI info indicating the ringing, speaking and then disconnect. The disconnect if done from the agent though after they have said the greeting two times and there is no answer.

 

[nohuhu]

harryhoudini66,

the most probable cause is no talkpath between a caller and an agent. i think you should tear down into this matter.

 

[petran]

Could you describe the config of your system ? Media server type, software/patch ,cabinets, fiber links, CSS, IPSIs ?

Petran.

 

[harryhoudini66]

I only know some of the info since I am the end user. I can go to the telecom guy but I am afraid I am not his favorite person right now. I think he is feeling intimidated since many times I have brought up features that he wasn’t even aware that existed. While my concern is that the call center is running as efficiently as possible, his is that it is running.

Avaya S8700/CM3/CMS12/240PRI Trunks

 

[smurfyIAG]

Hi again hh66, frankly if agents are averaging 5 silent calls a day that's 400 customers for whom the call centre is NOT running at all. 92% running is not acceptable in my book.
As dwalin points out, this means there is a fault causing no connect between the customer voice channel and the agent station.
Your "telecom guy" needs to get it fixed.

Sean Murphy
Call Centre Analyst
IAG New Zealand

 

[mrjedi]

OK, we have a similar problem whereby my customer gets calls delivered to the handset and the entire phone goes blank and call gets disconnected. This has been happening since January and Avaya finally said this is a design flaw and they are looking into it. They have assured us that there is no physical call in the system and that the call was disconnected on the network side. This proof ( via MST ) is only on their word but the agents have never heard anyone on the other line and talk path issues have also been investigated. MST traces shows disconnect from network so we have to let it go. We get about 15-20 calls a day with 150 agents. 3000 calls total a day. Have you done the MST traces yet ?

 

[petran]

ACM3.x has some bugs with call center agents getting no talk path if a call if answered by an agent in a port network different than the port network the incoming trunk resides... Talk to your distributors or businesspartners to check it out...

Petran.

 

[harryhoudini66]

Thanks for the tips guys. I am going to put some more pressure then. I have asked twice for follow-up since originaly reporting this issue and have not received a response.

 

[harryhoudini66]

Put some pressure and had to get hire ups involved before I got action. I ended up getting a reply suggesting that we run Agent Trace on the agents that have dropped calls. I replied letting them know that the magnitude of this problem was actually identified when we ran traces on agents and also did recordings. I offered printed agents trace reports and recordings. I have not heard back yet.

He basically whined that since we have a huge amount of trunks, it would be hard to identify. I am losing confidence in thus guy’s ability as each day goes by. I guess my best bet is to educate myself as much as I can. I already started viewing Vector, VDN and Trunk reports.

I don’t understand people sometimes. When I do something, I like to dive in big time and learn as much as I can. I get real passionate about it. Some people seam to do the job but don’t care much about it. He has been doing this for about 20 years and yet he did not know what Media Gateway we have. Also did not know how to read an Agent Trace report about ROIF, RONA, Abandoned Call Search, AUX Work codes. I certainly have a lot of work to do.