Symposium & ICM query

[V4DUR2]

Hi

***Hopefully im posting this in the correct area if not please advise. was unsure whether to post in Symposium or ICM Forum***

Now for the information.

We run a large enterprise (at least 17 sites) with Symposium 4.2 and 5 scattered around the country and with ICM v6 (local - v.7.0 Central sites).

We have had issues recently with skill changes to agents where the agent is stuck in ICM for whatever reason.
Now - what is the RECOMMENDATION for making skill changes? Should we have the agents logout whilst the changes are completed or can we do this change with the agents still logged in. I knoW our Avaya sites have zero issues and will update when the user changes sites but the Symposiums have a question mark due to previous history.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated

Kind Regards

 

[charliesp]

You absolutely must log the agents out when re-skilling if you're using Symposium. If not ICM will lose site of the agent and problems will follow.

 

[V4DUR2]

Thanks for that mate this then leads me to ask "so what would cause the random failures, as 99% of the changes we complete are when the user is on the phone (or any state other than looged out)?"

ICM takes real-Time feed from the Symposium "stats" server, does you (or anyone) believe that something is cause a link to temporarily fail?

Input most appreciated

 

[charliesp]

There are three connections between ICM and Symposium:
CTI
Real Time Data (RTD)
HDX

If you're CTI is scrappy that can cause issues, in your case I can guarantee that it's because agents are being reskilled whilst logged in.

I work for a major UK Retailer with intelligent routing over 3 sites, our ICM is managed by BT into our Symposiums. The problem isn't your feed, it's the actual monitoring that ICM does of the agent set. If you can run an OPC report you'll see that if an agent has been reskilled whilst logged in ICM ceases to see it properly.

The consequence is one of two things either it will not update the agent status so often the idle time goes through the roof or if you're using dual PGs when they swap sides and ICM starts seeing the agent in the skillgroups prior to your change.

This has been taken up with Cisco, it is a feature and it is a support requirement to log agents off when reskilling.

Our Resourcing Team love it

 

[V4DUR2]

Cheers again mate, will have to sort something else out.

Just on a side note what version of Symposium do you use? I have just had a conference with Nortel about updating to CC6 from 4.2 and part of the functional spec provided is that they can complete skill changes "on the fly" whilst it updates ICM at the backend (also can to Totalview which 4.2 doesnt (cant do)).

Chances are you know that but just thought i would let you know.

 

[charliesp]

We're using Symposium 5. There is a product Cisco do called AAS (which we don't use) it should automatically update agent / skillsets created or amended on the Symposium. The only problem is that it doesn't stop the issues with logging agents off as that's internal to ICM. I'd double check that info with either Cisco or your maintainer.