15 second wait before next dial

[benomg]

Hi,

I have the latest Vicibox install and it is running 8 agents very nicely although I'm currently trying to get the wait time down. Since there's only 8 people I have the campaigns set to RATIO. Because of the nature of our calls there's a good amount of answering machines so I have AMD on. The wait time was around 1 minute so I decided to some testing/investigation. One thing I did to try and speed the rate up is put the ringing time down to 10 seconds. Waiting times didn't change much. So I made a dummy campaign and let some calls go though to the 10 seconds, expecting that the dialer will just go straight to the next lead when the first lead is set to NA but there is a 15 second delay before the dialer tries the next lead number. I'm sure this is making up a nice chunk of the wait time. Is the 15 seconds interval between calls known about and if so can someone please explain what VD does in that time?

Just to recap, the campaign is basically:
Default RATIO settings
Autodial level 1
AMD on or off is the same result
Dial Timeout 10 secs
Hopper level 20

Is there anything else that might cause this?

BTW, I have the full version manual and searched it for settings that might cause this but turned up nothing.

[gardo]

You need to increase the auto-dial level if you want more calls coming in quickly to your agents. Setting the dial timeout to 10 is not the answer. That will actually limit the number of calls getting to your agent since 10 seconds is too low.

As per description, Dial timeout: If defined, calls that would normally hang up after the timeout defined in extensions.conf would instead timeout at this amount of seconds if it is less than the extensions.conf timeout. This means that calls will hangup after a certain number of period if no one answers them.

[benomg]

Thanks Gardo. Yes I understand the issues with lowering the ring timeout and what it does. I may need to fine tune that number but keep the idea. We have a lot AAs in our lists and also if a lead hasn't answered in 10 seconds there's a good change they're not going to so we don't want to wait around longer (our leads are businesses). I will keep an eye on total NA and AA to see if the total numbers for these stay the same (with the the short ring I want to see AA substituted with NA).

The reason I don't want to increase the auto dial level is the pitch is quite long and with 8 people there is the potential for lots of drops. I think. Am I kind of right about the drops?

My main concern is with that 15 seconds the dialer takes between hanging up on a call that is no answer and dialing the next call. Do you know if this can be fix so that if a call is no answer, vd dials the next lead straight away?

[gardo]

You can increase the dial level. However, as you mentioned since you only have 8 people the possibility of having lots of drop calls is there. One thing you can probably do is convert the campaign into a survey/broadcast type. You can play a recorded message to the other end and they press 1 or something if interested to get to your agents. You can have a high dial level with this campaign without having the lots of drop call issue (based on my experience).

[benomg]

OK, I see what your saying. I don't know if that will work for this situation unfortunately. Our lead base is fairly limited so each lead is important and we value the rapport that you get with a real agent making the call. Again that's why I'm trying to avoid drop calls. I will keep it in mind in case I can't work out this particular issue of 15 seconds delay when a call is marked as no answer.

My ideal situation would be to have the ring timeout at 10 seconds with a 1.0 ratio so that we can call around 6 leads in a minute per ready agent to give us a good chance of getting to a lead in under a minute. The problem at the moment is that VD will ring for 10 seconds, hang up because of no answer, then vicidial waits 15 seconds for no apparent reason thus making it only possible to try 3 leads in a minute and taking 2 and a half minutes to try 6 leads. Is there a way to remove that 15 seconds of nothingness when a call is marked as no answer?

[okli]

Can you post a screenshot of your detailed campaign settings?
There could be something you are overlooking.

[benomg]

Quite possible. Cheers.

My other thought is it's part of the software design.

[okli]

If you wish experiment if that works for you:

- use dial method ADAPT_AVERAGE
- set hopper level to 100, just in case
- set AVAILABLE ONLY TALLY to YES
- MAXIMUM ADAPT LEVEL 4.0 or 5.0
- DIAL LEVEL DIFFERENCE TARGET -3 for now, pay attention to minus sign
- DIAL TIMEOUT - 15-25,
- CALL DROP SECONDS- 5
- Campaign VDAD extension- maybe change to 8368 to turn AMD off, could you be reaching lots of phones with IVR, detected as AA, since you are calling businesses?
- DROP ACTION- IN_GROUP, create IN GROUP and activate blended calling. Have all agents to log into IN GROUP as well. Use nice "Please hold on while..." message to keep customers on the phone. This way rather than playing a message to dropped calls, you will be sending them to IN GROUP where calls can be answered again should an agent become available. Set it up as per Manager's manual.
- DROP TRANSFER GROUP- the newly create IN GROUP
- make sure in ADMIN-->SERVERS you put proper value for Max VICIDIAL Trunks. Adjust MAXIMUM ADAPT LEVEL if you are not reaching your lines capacity or are going into trunk shortages constantly.

One of the most important setting you need to play with is DIAL LEVEL DIFFERENCE TARGET, meaning how many agents dialer will try to keep always available (when negative value is used). Depending on your leads you may need to increase or decrease that value, it's matter of experimenting while watching dropped calls and agent's waiting time on the live screen.

You may also want to play with Adapt Intensity Modifier, but that's for later.

I think with 8 agents you have pretty good chances with some fine tuning to use predictive dialing, keeping agents busy and having few dropped calls thanks to sending them back to IN GROUP.

We have been using similar setup for campaigns with 6-35 agents with great success, having lots of AA/NA/B, and keeping agents wait time 10-30 seconds at max with less than 1 or 2% dropped calls. Just needs a little patience and an eye on the real time screen most of the time.

[benomg]

Thanks for that okli. There's some nice tips there for predictive dialing that I will be able to use. I'm still very interested in working out what VD is doing in this void of action. I'm moving this to General Discussion as it's more about the workings of VD rather than support on how to use it.

Follow here, http://www.vicidial.org/VICIDIALforum/v ... php?t=9168.