Question Information: My customer has a PC4.1 system, coupled with a Voice Portal (IVR) solution and utilizes evening campaigns for their US customers. There are no (zero) live agents; the call is handled by a "virtual agent). The dialing window is limited to 2 hours within each time zone (6-8pm local time). Each job is set to start at its appropriate time offset and stop two hours later.
Question: Has anyone found a way to run a single job that will handle the time offset start times across multiple time zones? Example: Start Eastern time calls a 6pm EST, stop at 8pm EST, start Central time calls at 6pm CST, stop at 8pm CST, etc.
The solution in place today is to run timezone specific selections and corresponding jobs. This does not play well with virtual agents, since they cannot be assigned to more than one job at a time. This practice forces the business to manually move agents from job to job or purchase more licenses than are necessary, in order to assign a quantity that will be able complete the job in the alotted time.
The Alternate Initial Phone number was tauted as a possible solution, since it offers what appears to be an alternate dial time, but to-date we have not seen this demonstrated.
Any suggestions or recommendations will be greatly appreciated.
[ February 15, 2010, 12:49 PM: Message edited by: snowdog ]
From: Missouri, USA | Registered: Feb 2010
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Why not have the supervisors turn timezones on and off on one job? they can do that on the fly in monitor? a lot easier then changing jobs?
-------------------- Any answers provide herein are probably the ramblings of a man driven insane by dialog designer. no purchase necessary. mileage will vary.
From: san antonio | Registered: Apr 2009
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This is a lights-out operation and the customer does not want to have any personnel spending time on the process after the job begins. If you have a fully automated way of turning time zones on and off, that might be helpful.
Thanks,
From: Missouri, USA | Registered: Feb 2010
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posted
the only way I could see to automate that is to create a series of timezone based jobs and link them together.
-------------------- Any answers provide herein are probably the ramblings of a man driven insane by dialog designer. no purchase necessary. mileage will vary.
From: san antonio | Registered: Apr 2009
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posted
Where do you link them at: in the job? One issue may be that they overlap each other by one hour as the time zones go West.
Have you heard of "Command-Line" use to create selections and run jobs? There is little to no information about it, but I'm being lead to believe that this might hold the answer.
From: Missouri, USA | Registered: Feb 2010
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posted
I've got command line now, I'm not sure what if any programming or scripting could be done to overcome this.
if you set up direct start/stop times on the job it should link over and there may be no overlap if that's the requirement.
-------------------- Any answers provide herein are probably the ramblings of a man driven insane by dialog designer. no purchase necessary. mileage will vary.
From: san antonio | Registered: Apr 2009
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posted
real quick here is an exerpt from avaya on the time zone settings.
Time zone Sorting Alternatives for Record Selections and Jobs
Option 1:
Ignore Time Zone in record selection is ‘unchecked’ = NO AND Order Zones in job is ‘unchecked’ = NO
This causes the dialer to ‘sort’ your record selection into time zone buckets from east to west. It sorts all the EST records into a listing, then all the CST records into a listing, then all the MST records into a listing, and so on. Then, the dialer begins dialing in the order the time zone buckets are sorted. For example if EST and CST are the only time zones open to dial, based on guard times, then the dialer will dial the first record in the EST bucket, then the first record in the CST bucket, then the second record in the EST bucket, and then the second record in the CST bucket, and so on. Once the MST time zone opens up, then the dialer will dial the next record in the EST bucket, then the next record in the CST bucket, and then the first record in the MST bucket, then next in EST, next in CST, next in MST and so on. This pattern continues as more time zones open up for dialing.
NOTE: This is the standard way the dialer was originally designed to dial and sort records on record selections.
Option 2:
Ignore Time Zone in record selection is ‘unchecked’ = NO AND Order Zones in job is ‘checked’ = YES
This causes the dialer to ‘sort’ your record selections in the same manner as option 1 above. The only difference is the way the dialer calls the records. The dialer must finish dialing all the EST records before moving to CST records. It must finish dialing the CST records before moving to the MST records. This continues for all time zones. This is also called ‘follow the sun’ dialing.
Option 3:
Ignore Time Zone in record selection is ‘checked’ = YES AND Order Zones in job is ‘unchecked’ = NO
This causes the dialer to create a new time zone bucket called the ‘+‘ zone. This zone is setup to be able to dial for 24 hours a day 7 days a week. This is the only true sort of your record selection. This feature does NOT ignore guard times. It will skip records in its + zone sort until the time zone opens up for dialing and will then go back into the sort, catch up on all the records it had to skip due to guard times until it is caught up again. This is the only true sorting of record selections.
-------------------- Any answers provide herein are probably the ramblings of a man driven insane by dialog designer. no purchase necessary. mileage will vary.
From: san antonio | Registered: Apr 2009
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posted
Thanks for the information. I've looked at the Ignore Time Zone settings and could not find a scenario that met the criteria we are looking for. The issue is the guard times. . . we want to customize the guard times to only be between 6-8pm local time in each time zone. This has to be a job-level setting, since other jobs have differenct guard times and we cannot set the system's default "timezone.cfg" to anything other than the default.
From: Missouri, USA | Registered: Feb 2010
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posted
you can have support modify the guard times. but it will effect every job on the dialer.
-------------------- Any answers provide herein are probably the ramblings of a man driven insane by dialog designer. no purchase necessary. mileage will vary.
From: san antonio | Registered: Apr 2009
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posted
Or, you can create customized versions of timezone.cfg and use them with your respective jobs. However, you will need to modify your call selection .
-------------------- Rookie Dialer
From: USA | Registered: May 2007
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What rookie said, you can create an alternate timezone file and use that for your selections, but using the new timezone file I only know how to do that in command line, I never found a way to use the GUI functions.
For commandline you would use the -t option and then include the name of the timezone file. One thing to note, there is quirk in that the timezone file name should not be greater than 8 characters or the file name will not be recognized in the -t option.
From: Minneapolis | Registered: May 2005
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So, I've got Avaya PS wanting us to spend some dough on telling us whether this will work for us or not. Can anyone provide the step by step process for making this work? What kind of hoops did you jump through to get command-line access to the dialer? I will appreciate any and all information.
Thanks
From: Missouri, USA | Registered: Feb 2010
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posted
you can make all the timezones you want, but the area code and prefix has to match the timezones you create.
As far as hoops with getting command line, I got admin quite readily as I've gone through the CLA training.
-------------------- Any answers provide herein are probably the ramblings of a man driven insane by dialog designer. no purchase necessary. mileage will vary.
From: san antonio | Registered: Apr 2009
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posted
also they probably require you pay for the class at avaya U and go to highland's ranch co for training.
good place to learn. I highly recommend it. I had a really good teacher there, and the beer at C.B. and potts is really good.
-------------------- Any answers provide herein are probably the ramblings of a man driven insane by dialog designer. no purchase necessary. mileage will vary.
From: san antonio | Registered: Apr 2009
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-------------------- Any answers provide herein are probably the ramblings of a man driven insane by dialog designer. no purchase necessary. mileage will vary.
From: san antonio | Registered: Apr 2009
| IP: Logged |
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