Shoretel Predictive Dialer

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.