Remote Agents Quick Guide to using VICIdial

[thephaseusa]

Has anyone written a short guide for using VICIdial, with remote agents in mind?
Covering, say:

1. Installing and Configuring a Soft Phone
2. Logging In and Choosing a campaign
3. Setting your INGroups
4. Learning the different tabs
5. How to fill out the FORM tab
6. How to disposition each call
7. Pausing your station and logging in and out
8. How dispo_send_email works
9. How call back dispositions work
10. Handling calls that come in with no information (they called back from a different number than we called them on

I realize the VICIdial Agent Manual is excellent. But has anyone condensed it down to a few pages that would be enough for someone to get started calling? If not I think I think I will write such a guide.

Any advice would be appreciated. I recently have become aware the US is full of agents accustomed to working at home, and I’d like to start hiring from that pool. This came about the last few days because someone responded to a help wanted ad I ran, and it turned out they had worked on VICIdial before!

John Merritt
www.thephaseusa.com

[williamconley]

Vicidial Manager's Manual. Not the agent's manual. Start at page one. Don't skip anything. NO it's not "quick/short", but it is FREE and will take you from Zero to fully functional in a couple hours or days depending on your ability to follow directions (or a couple weeks ... if you're not lucky, but still free).

Dispo send email is not a "remote agents" function. It's a completely separate topic.

In fact, none of what you listed in your 10 items is related to "remote agents", but to generic setup of a Vicidial system and specifically what the Vicidial Manager's Manual was designed for. Start at page one. Don't Skip. Seriously.

Specifically: Remote agents do not dispo calls or send emails or have any interaction with the form tab.

If by "remote agents" you refer to the physical location of the agent who is logging in to Vicidial, please be informed that location is irrelevant to Vicidial operation. Your agents can be anywhere and are treated the same as if they are sitting next to the server. Remote agents are defined in Vicidial as "Agents who do not have a computer, and as such can not dispo or store data for each prospect." They just answer and talk and hang up. That's a remote agent. No computer-related interaction is required with Vicidial at all for remote agents.

There are copious numbers of youtube videos available.

The Vicidial Group offers an in-person training seminar which is unbelievably awesome. http://www.eflo.net/training.php

We (PoundTeam Incorporated, where I work) offer a three hour "basic quick-start" training course on our web site to get from "I have a functional server ... now what?" to "Dialing!" with a single agent on a single campaign with fake leads. All that's necessary after that training is duplication of that agent, and adding in real leads (instead of your cell phone as our fake prospect, upon which we usually practice). That basic training usually takes three hours, costs $105, and must be scheduled a couple weeks in advance (long line for that). It pales by comparison to the Vicidial Group training, but it is popular. It also required a fully-functional Vicidial server upon which to train. We can let you use a "sampler server", but then when you're done ... you can't "just get dialing" cuz you don't have a server.

[thephaseusa]

Let me rephrase:

I mean hiring agents who will not work at our call center, but work from home, logging in remotely. That’s what i meant by remote agents.

Yes you can send them the manual and everything is in there. I asked has anyone written a short guide for how an agent who has never worked on VICIdial which would walk them through setting up a soft phone , logging in through their web browser, and dispositioning calls.

Sorry if I didn’t state my question clearly the first time.

John

[williamconley]

Let me rephrase:

I mean hiring agents who will not work at our call center, but work from home, logging in remotely. That’s what i meant by remote agents.

Yes you can send them the manual and everything is in there. I asked has anyone written a short guide for how an agent who has never worked on VICIdial which would walk them through setting up a soft phone , logging in through their web browser, and dispositioning calls.

Sorry if I didn’t state my question clearly the first time.

John

Ah, understood. Sorry for the rant.

There are hundreds of soft phones. The individual soft phone will determine the "setup" of the soft phone, which is both unrelated to Vicidial and specific to the phone. So, no. No universal manual for that. However, there should be a setup video for whatever soft phone you're using (without relation to Vicidial) or you can screen shot each piece of that puzzle. You need to provide each user with their domain or ip; extension; and registration password. Yuo may also need to translate domain/extension/password to whatever their brand of softphone wants to call those items.

Then the Agent manual used for everyone at that point, except your Campaign configuration will make all sorts of changes based on how you set it up. It doesn't get a lot of rewriting for that reason: There are so many campaign options available now that a comprehensive manual would be difficult. You could try the Paid version of the Agent Manual which should be better than the free version at least. But you're probably better using CamStudio to record a local agent performing the necessary tasks and end up with a training video specific to your implementation.

On the lighter side: Soon WebRTC in Vicidial will yield a web-based phone. The agents will then only need a Mic/Headset.

If you're in a hurry for that, I'm sure the Vicidial Group can be bribed into putting more man-hours into it sooner. lol

[thephaseusa]

Yes recording a YouTube video of an agent installing zoiper, configuring an account, registering it, then logging in to VICIdial, and processing and disposing of a few calls is a great idea William! That and the agent manual would be awesome.

By the way, the reason I mentioned short guide is that I had an agent who wanted to work, i could tell he was experienced in my field of telemarketing and a good salesman, so I told him how we worked over the phone and emailed him a copy of the agent manual. After a few days he sent me an email saying something like “man just let me call on a manual phone and dial numbers myself like I’ve always done.” I think the length of the manual intimidated him))) I’m not saying he is a typical agent candidate, but I think along with the agent manual maybe a 2 or 3 page Quick Guide would be a nice touch also.

John

[williamconley]

“man just let me call on a manual phone and dial numbers myself like I’ve always done.”

That's not the result of a lengthy manual. That's an "I wanna do it my way, without any direct supervision" personality. And it's why he's currently unemployed. If you let him do it, he'll work great for a little while (different in each case) and then fall back on whatever old habit he has that results in being unemployed.

Vicidial fixes that. They log in, Vicidial does the rest. Those cases which are particularly difficult will still try to "game the system" by sitting on pause or on a dead call: But those are Visible in vicidial. So you can take corrective action even if they are in Barbuda while you're in Vegas.

Good luck.

PS: Would he also like you to print the phone numbers and fax them to him? lol

[thephaseusa]

Hehe......no he likes his leads handwritten in blue ink on 3X5 cards, and on friday he’d appreciate it if you’d Western Union him his pay check, and put a password on it so he can pick it without ID, since, you know, he lost that a while back and its a hassle to get a new one.

[williamconley]

leads on 3x5 cards. brings back the days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9XW6P0tiVc

[thephaseusa]

They sent the phone book to some gal in New Mexico, she would card up every business in the town on a 3X5 card in black or blue ink. (For residence calling they would just strip up the residence pages, tear one page into 3 strips.) They would write up the previous customers in red ink on 3x5’s, and they would pull the matching cold cards out of the stack so there wouldn’t be dupe calls. Each day a salesman would get a stack of cold calls, and a little stack of about $200 worth of renewal cards, or he’d get his own renewals from the year before if he worked the year before. One of the big rules was no cross calling. If a customer told you to call a different number you had to take the card to the manager, he would pull the card for the number you wanted to call. If it was still there he would give you that card, and you could call it. If it wasn’t there he would tell you, no you can’t call that number, it’s out in the room already. 1984. Seattle Washington. Nile Shrine Temple))))

Then there were the old-timers, who would tell stories of being issued rolls of dimes and driving to a small town and working from a pay phone. Even I got sent to a couple of small towns with motel money. I drove to the town, checked in at 9AM to a motel with free local calls, sat down and called the whole town in a day. Then I checked out and drove back. Early days of telemarketing in the USA.

[jincy_joy]

Hey,
I can help you with one of the topics you mentioned i.e., Disposing of A Call

After a call is hung-up, there comes a Disposition Screen. And you can find a number of options available to set the appropriate status of calls.
To select a status, you can either double-click the link or click the link once and then select the SUBMIT option.
You can even customize the disposition screen either by choosing from the pre-defined options or by submitting your own.

Hope am able to help in a small way..