New Customer Questions

Have a few questions: 1. The software does not seem to recognize most of the disconnected numbers. It show them as no answers. I spot checks many of the numbers with a hard telephone and they were disconnected. Is there a setting we might have wrong?

For release before 7.6.1, there is no settings for that. It should be automatic. Later releases can turn on and off the disconnected number detection on Gateway > Setup > Option > Advamced. Please note that the disconnected number detection does not work all the time, the reasons are explained below. The detection works better when an analog phone line (PSTN) is used then when VOIP is used. The detection also requires more computational resource, the default is off.

The detection of disconnected number is not 100% but should work most of the times. For humans, when we call a number that is disconnected, we understand the phone company’s message “the number you are calling is no long in service, …”. But programs do not understand the message which justs sounds like an answering machine message. The only indication for a disconnected nunber is the initial tone, a.k.a, special information tone (SIT), played by the phone company. For disconnected number tone, the frequency of the tones is fixed and is pretty standard. However, some companies, especially mobile companies, do not strictly follow that.

The system may also failed to detect the disconnected tone if the phone audio is not clear. If you use VOIP service, please make sure you have enough internet connection bandwidth. Sometimes, VOIP services may over compress the audio stream in order to save bandwidth. But that makes the tone detection even harder.

If you want us to take a look at your specific situation, please do the following:

1. Go to Voicent gateway, select Help main menu, then select “Record Initial dialing”. You could take a look at the video help in the dialog window
2. Open the following folders: (each line has its own folder)
C:\Program Files\Voicent\gateway\work\telcache\0
and you should see a lot of audio files labeled “pickup_*.wav“, where * is the phone number called.
3. Find the one that you can hear it is disconnected but the program failed to detect as disconnected number, send us email with the pickup_.wav files attached

We’ll take a look at them and get back to you.

For predictive dialing, there is normally no need to distinguish disconnected number and answering machine. Both will be skipped. For fast dialing, please make sure you have set the “disconnect as soon as answering machine is detected” on Voicent Gateway (Setup > Options > advanced tab)

2. Can we get individual stats on each operator such as
a. talk time
b. how many call they excepted
c. avg talk time ect

Yes. You can access the statistics by selecting Predictive > Report…

3. Does the software provide a beep to the agent notifing them when they have connected with a call?

For autodialing, the system will play a ring sound.

For predictive dialing, the audio is immediately connected. An agent can easily tell a call is connected from the headset audio. It should go from silence to some background noise. It is usually not a good idea to play a beep since you want the agent talk on the phone as soon as he sees the popup screen. When the audio is connected, the person called has already said “hello” and is waiting to hear something. Any delay, like playing a beep, may cause him to hangup the phone.

4. Should we use the DTMF setting within the gateway?

No, there is no need for that.