Percentage or Sequential Routing 1

[fastbusy]

I have responsibility for a voice infrastructure of 15 Definity G3R's across Europe and have been asked by Management to prepare for an abnormally large volume of incoming calls by routing incoming calls to two geographically remote call centres.

These calls are to be allocated 50% to Holland and 50% to Maidenhead, UK, and arrive as a termination from a single MCI DDI/DID. Alternatively, management would accept sequential routing (outbound) - site A, B, A, B etc...

My prime idea for providing this was to receive calls via a term-ext or hunt of 2 sta's callforwarded to outgoing VDNs linked to handling vectors. As expected this did not work. The calls were intercepted and dropped to the attendant console. If I remove queueing from the hunt group, the calls slow busy.

I've also considered remote coverage and time of day coverage

Any ideas / suggestions much apreciated ... Cheers, Giles C. 44 7977 25 7342

 

[mainepe]

If it's not essential that the calls hit your PBXs first (hard to tell, especially since you describe experimenting with an under-the-covers solution), you might consider what network routing/allocation features your LDC (MCI?) offers. Here in the US at least, LDCs, and some LECs (particularly those offering 800 service), offer customers a number of features that enable network allocation of calls to a single dialed number among a number of terminations. These range from menu selection of predetermined % allocations, to near real-time automated allocations based on ACD historical statistics (AT&T's brandmark for the latter is "Route-It", which draws upon CMS data).

At the next level down, you may want to look into something like Definity Best Services Routing (available above V7), with or without Customer Advocate. This feature set allows interflow among networked PBXs, over DCS or other point-to-point connection types. The most apparent gain is the availability of additional vector commands that allow you to program the set of local conditions for which you interflow calls to the remote location, and the fraction of the local calls that you want to interflow. (You're silent as to whether the remote sites are yours, or a service provider, so there's no way for me to filter whether this kind of capital investment makes sense, or is even possible given control rights over the environment.)

You describe the calls as coming to a single "DID" number, but given that your sites are so distributed, I'm guessing maybe you mean a single toll-free number. With this in mind, does the carrier offer dialed-number identification service (DNIS) [they must], can you get them to translate the "DID", and deliver a VDN number as the delivered dialed digits? Armed with this, you'd at least be able to provide vector handling without the console intercepts you describe.

While it sounds like you're probably interested in real-time load-sharing (i.e.--the two remote locations have about half the volume each at any single instant in time), if you were willing to accept a situation where, at the end of the day, aggregate call volume ended up split 50/50, once you can get the calls into a vector, you could specify a plethora of TOD routing steps that change the number to which the calls are sent every 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 1 minute......you pick the granularity. While clumsy, risky, and costly in terms of PBX CPU utilization (plus you might run out of vector steps!), it seems like it could be represented as being consistent with the "sequential routing" alternative you said was acceptable to your management.

An extremely low-end solution would be to queue the calls to a single skill at each site, and manually transfer them to the remote offices (I'd like to see the job description for that--"telecom call transfer tech", etc.). Sounds pretty dumb, but I've seen it done plenty of times as a means to peak shave, when the more elegant methods described above fall flat.

 

[fastbusy]

LDC's & Call Collection - For the ACDs I describe, the calls do hit our PBX first - this way we retain complete control of the scenario.

You mention LDC PTTs - well we're currently using the European equivalent of MCI's US VNet solution (They call it GVV here). Basically that allows us to keep international calls on net to all of our sites throughout Europe and the US.

Collection, Routing and Handling - We usually collect on our own DID ranges - the customer, for example, if from Germany could call a DID ext. set up by myself on our Dusselfor G3 - This routes to the call-centre handling destination (Holland or England) for processing. Some sites do not have vectoring so we have to use call forwarding (much to my disgust - console permissions are pretty much protected but even so this is very bad practive). We can't get funding easily to upgrade 15 PBXes and some are version 4, which means a new shelf upgrade to go to version 9 (out soon) - or so I'm told.

The customer-numbers are pre-advertised and longstanding. This makes it more difficult for the business to make changes.

We use some of the PTT-based 0800 services for other elements of our telephony - We have a "Follow The Sun" service to route support-call traffic to differing sites time-of-day dependant. Also for our main US-based 0800 number, the PTT offer a pre-specified routing table/matrix -ultimately we can call them to request changes.

I was not aware, though, of the other features of which you talk - this sounds very useful since sometimes the Definity, although an excellent platform, does not have the features that we require. We're running r.6 on the PBX local to myself.

Admin Rights - We have access to the console of each Definity in our company via DSA - This is especially useful although I do not like the fact that the modem settings for each PBX are OS independant and different from each other. This should all be configurable. Per Network vs. Per Site etc.

PTT-based DID Translation - I'm sure this is possible but until now have never considered it in this context.

Huge amounts of Time of Day Routing - Messy but possible. I guess I could always route to another VDN at the end of the vector in order to bypass the 30 step vector limitation. This is quite annoying ;-)

DCS / P2P Networking - Here in the UK we have 3 G3's, all linked via 15 channels of a DCS E1 Muxed ISDN30E circuit. I am looking at competitive rates from other PTTs at the moment though. GVV saves us approx. 50 per cent on on-net international.

Mobile Telephony - We are looking at BT's Mobile Extentsions service. They offer on-net office to mobile and vice versa plus link to Cellnet via a new circuit (costs factored in - E1 not analogue!) They also cut the rates of off net national calls by approx. 30 per cent. The on-net mobile call saving is approx. 30 per cent. Do you have similar things in the US ?

Video Conferencing - We're using Polyspan View Stations utilising muxed BRI from our G3's. This does not yet work over the MCI circuit. Initially I suspected robbed bit to be the cause so tried connection in 56k multiples. Still does not work. Over local PTTs our connection rates vary. Indeed, it is possible to connect at 512k, although this a little sporadic.

VoD - We're looking at this in terms of carrier-cost-reductions and will implement in at least 2 years time. Although LAN based telephony would be nice for soft-phones etc., since we already have an infrastructure in place, we are looking to build upon this, not replace it. I'm pro-Lucent - for all their failings I believe they are the best at what they do. We're upgrading our Cisco switches to QoS enabled 4000 series units to plan for VoD requrement and are implementing an ATM WAN backbone. I am not impressed by Cisco's offerings in terms of VoD - They make great switches and routers, but what I really need is features.

Having praised Lucent, I must say that I am not at all impressed by the general standard of their software engineering.

I want to say thanks for your help by the way - It's nice to have the chance to discuss our ideas and situations with someone who knows a lot about the field of telephony.