When Announcement Plays It Takes 5 Seconds For Hold Music To Come Back From Silence

[Turtlepuke]

Hi,
I added an announcement to a vector that has hold music. Whenever the announcement plays, it takes several seconds for the hold music to come back.
So it could appear to the caller that the dead air means the call has dropped. Anyone know a way around that?


Thanks!!!

 

[Stinney]

Are you sure your announcement is clean and doesn't have dead air at the end?

What is in your vector step? Is the announcement in a collect step? If so, the system is going to wait for digits to be pressed, then go to the next step.

- Stinney

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” - Confucius

 

[Turtlepuke]

Yes, it's a collect digits step. Is there any way to control the amount of time it waits? or is that a system parameter?
We have thousands of VDNs and Vectors so I don't want to globally change them all.

 

[Stinney]

It's a system wide parameter, (interdigit timeout), you can't change it per vector.

I wouldn't recommend setting it too low, 3 seconds is the default and is a reasonable amount of time to wait for digits to be entered. Less than that you can run into issues with users not being able to enter a digit before the call moves on to the next step in the vector.

- Stinney

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” - Confucius

 

[Turtlepuke]

Thanks so much for the info, Stinney!

 

[Turtlepuke]

One other slightly related question. I'm collecting a digit and if they press 1 it sends them to a step that routes them to a voicemail extension.
In CMS, would that register as an abandoned call?
Seems like the manager is complaining about lots of abandons.

Thanks again!

 

[Stinney]

I'm assuming you're giving them this option when they are waiting in queue for an agent already. If the call hasn't been sent to a queue-to step it will not show in a skill report as abandoned as it never queued to the skill. It will show up in a VDN or Vector abandonment data point in CMS.

If you send the call to a messaging system after being queued to a skill, that would be counted as an OUTFLOWCALLS.

An abandoned call is only when the call is queued to the skill and the caller hangs up (there is a far end disconnect) before the agent answers the call (this also includes when the call is ringing on the agent phone, or while whispers are playing).

Something to consider is setting up service-level increments in the CMS system. Consider this, if someone chooses to be put into queue and hangs up 5 seconds after being put in queue, that's only 1 ring cycle. Should that really be considered an abandoned call? The caller didn't even wait 5 seconds for someone to answer. At some companies I've been at, if the service level agreement was that they would answer a call within 20 seconds of being queued, they wanted the abandonment service-level set so that anything under 20 seconds was not considered abandoned as the caller didn't give them the allowed amount of time in the SLA to answer.The service-level settings and reports will also give you a better view into how long callers are waiting and then hanging up.

- Stinney

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” - Confucius

 

[Turtlepuke]

This is good info. Thank you again! I love the site!