I wanted to know how to utilize your software with an extension? For example, if I wanted to call (999) 999-9999 at extension 101 how would that be entered into the CRM data to accurately auto dial the customer and extension?

With normal outbound calling campaigns, this cannot be done. The reason is that the dialer will first detect whether a call is answered by a human or machine. If it is a machine, it will try to wait for the beep to lease a voice message (or skip the machine if no audio is defined for the campaign).

The software is actually capable of entering extension numbers after a call is connected. So for special situations, such as you know the target phone system you are calling, then you can use the automated dialer to handle extensions. For example, we have customers using our dialer (with IVR app to enter extension number) to test their own phone system. We have a couple of blog articles describe these special situations. But for general purpose, calling phone number with extensions will not work (they will be treated as machine, but won’t be able to leave a message).

We will be using a new callerID number, and acknowledge that many people who miss calls often call the missed number back. Hence, we would like our agent(s) to take incoming calls while in a predictive dialer campaign. Clearly I understand that if all agents are engaged in active calls, the inbound call would need to be go into a queue or voicemail. However, we want the agents to try to get inbound calls for the Phone Number appearing on the callerID for contacts in the dialer campaign. How is this best achieved? Thanks

Yes, with Voicent blended call center solution, your agents can be on a predictive dialer campaign and answering incoming calls. On Voicent cloud, the inbound lines/channels are separate from outbound channels, so calls will not conflict. Normally, businesses use less inbound channels than outbound channels. The maximum inbound channels needed is the total incoming calls in peak time, including the calls waiting in the queue.

Now for caller ID. If any agent can answer incoming calls from any customer, then it is simple. Just choose one incoming number as caller ID for all your campaigns.

If customers are assigned to different agents and you want customer call backs to go to the right agent, then you need to do the following:

1. Give each agent an incoming phone number. When choosing the flex plan, if you have 10 agents, make sure to choose 10 x “inbound call center with phone number” feature.
2. Go to agent profile to set the caller ID. This will make sure the caller ID is displayed correctly when an agent makes a manual call
3. Each agent should run his own campaigns, with his own assigned list and select his caller ID for the campaign

Are advanced search contact lists dynamic? I am using an “Advanced Search List” for my Predictive Dialer campaign and every day I will be adding new contacts to the CRM. Will those new contacts be dynamically added to the campaign if they meet the “Advanced Search List” criteria?

It depends. Below are rules regarding how campaign list are managed.

1). When you first create a campaign, during campaign preparation phase, all contacts that satisfy the search criteria are added to the campaign. Once done, this list is set.
2). Contacts added later that satisfy the search criteria will not be added to the campaign by default
3). Pause and resume campaign will not affect the campaign list
4). Re-run campaign will go through campaign preparation phase again, so the list will be created at that time. The list can be different from the list the first time the campaign is run.

If contacts are to be added to a dynamic campaign, you need to utilize the workflow engine, which is capable of adding new contacts to a dynamic campaign.