I’ve been looking at the Agent Dialer and Gateway products. We are interested in implementing a predictive dialing capability, but I have a technical question.

We run an outbound call center doing lead qualification and live lead transfer. We use a custom C# .NET CRM system that controls all of the lead and outbound call management, using a Shoretel phone system. Our CRM system uses the Shoretel SDK COM interface to manage calls, so we would like to keep as much of that unchanged as possible.

So, to implement predictive dialing, I would like our application to manage the scheduling, and also manage the call once a human has answered. Thus the piece we need is technology to detect a human vs ans machine vs busy, etc. It looks like the Gateway does that, but we need a tight interface to our application.

Questions:
1) Using the Gateway and VXML, can we have the Gateway initiate a dial over SIP extensions, and notify our application when a human answers?
2) Can we direct what SIP line (user) is used for a call, so that we can grab the call in the Shoretel system and transfer to one of our agents? Or, can you tell us what SIP line was used when a human answers?

With those two capabilities, I think we could initiate calls, use your human/ans machine/etc detection, but then control the call as we do today with our CRM.

Hope that all makes sense. Any insight you could provide would be helpful.

Yes, it makes sense. But there is one major problem with this integration due to the nature of the predictive dialing method. Regardless of what kind of predictive dialers used, the most important issue is to have an almost instant call transfer when a call is answered by human. Otherwise, the callee is likely to hang up the phone. Predictive dialing is different from autodialing, where an audio message is first played when a call is answered. So the callee, after pressing a key for talking to agent, knows he has to wait for the call transfer to happen. For predictive dialing, without first playing an audio file, the callee only hear silence during the call transfer and is likely to hangup. So instead of ring a Shoretel phone, a call should be transferred to an agent’s computer with a screen popup and audio immediately available (computer headset).

Other than that, the integration with Shoretel VOIP service and CRM should be easy.

1. Configure Voicent Gateway to use Shoretel VOIP service directly. Setup each Voicent line as a SIP softphone. For details, please see Setup Voicent to Use VOIP

2. Integrate with CRM. We have an open source project on SugarCRM’s website you can take a look at. Basically, it launches the Agent Dialer from CRM, and when a call is finished, Agent Dialer calls a callback function to update the CRM system.

If I want to buy only the product “Agent Dialer (predictive dialer)”, for 4 lines (for example) the cost is ($ 899), but also I have to buy the software agent gateway to 4 lines ($ 999) or This product works separately? If they work together, should I need to pay $ 1,900, right?

No. All you need to pay is AgentDialer for $899. The features for predictive dialing and semi automatic dialing of the gateway are included in the purchase.

I have a small call center in Argentina and another in Spain and also a company of .NET development. I have a CRM (developed in. NET) I currently use for my call center campaigns. Could integrate my CRM with “Agent Dialer” and “Agent Gateway”? . In particular, the following points need to solve

It should be easy to integrate Agent dialer with your CRM system. Basically, Agent Dialer provides two integration related features:

1. Command line for invoking AgentDialer from other programs, such as CRM
2. Callback URL or program when a call is finished.

For details, please see Agent Dialer’s Help file. You can also take a look at our open source SugarCRM project, which is listed on SugarExchange.

a) I need that when “Agent dialer contact phone number, CRM automatically display customer information to the agent (the agent dialer will have to return the phone that has been communicated to the CRM so that it seek and find information this client). Is this possible?

Yes. Normally you invoke Agent Dialer from your CRM program. So all you need to do is supply the information on the command line. When agent gets the screen popup, it should contain all information in the Agent Dialer spreadsheet.

b) I need the “Agent Gateway” or “Dialer Agent” can make calls that have been scheduled by the CRM, and even that when they make the call, it forwards the agent exactly what sheduled the call and not to any agent. Is this possible?

Not for this release. But we are considering such an enhancement in future releases.

c) It is likely that some want to make it through the campaign mode, semi-automatic / non-predictive. ” The problem I see is that I have to manually press the NEXT CALL button for the “agent dialer” make the next call. I can program this to be done automatically? That is, when an agent finishes a call, it automatically forwards it to agent without anyone press the “next call?

You have to press a key or the Next Call button to continue. The reason is that an agent may need time to type in some notes.

Please, I need to respond to these questions as soon as possible bacause I am very interested in buying your products.

Thanks. We’ll try our best to answer your questions as soon as we can.

In the predictive dialer mode can I automatically play a short message when there is a live answer? For example, the call is connected to a live person and when that person says, “Hello” a message plays “Please hold for an agent”. That way there isn’t just silence between the live answer and the connection to an agent. Is that possible?

Yes. All you need to do is specify the audio file for live answer from the predictive dial setup window (the popup window when you click start dial).

Can I run two campaigns (two separate sets of data) at one time (10 lines for each campaign using the 20 line multi agent dialer)? If yes, can I determine which agents get which transfers (so I can completely separate the two campaigns)? Or would I need to buy to copies of the software and run them simultaneously to do what I’m describing above?

Yes. You can specify how many lines to use for a particular campaign, again from the same window mentioned above. This is a newly added feature, so you must use release 7.6.1 or later. However, for now, you cannot separate agents for the two campaigns. If you do want to separate agents, then you need to buy another copy of the software and run it on a different computer.

When I upgrade my computer tower how do I switch the software to the new computer?

You can transfer the license to the new computer.