Skipping Busy Remote Agents

[agritton]

I've searched for a solution to this everywhere and so far no luck. Hopefully somewhere here can shed some light on this for me. By the way thanks for all the hard work you guys put into this software, it's a life saver!

First off we're using VICIdial
VERSION: 2.8-424a
BUILD: 140126-2253

Next we're using X-Lite for the softphones.
VERSION: 4.5.5 71236

What we want is to have an inbound campaign where all of our agents are remote agents with phone on-hook set to 'Y'. The issue we are having is that it doesn't detect if an agent is currently on the phone. The queue works properly and sends the call around to all the agents but if an agent is on the phone or disconnected it still attempts to send the queued call to that agent. Are there any settings to tell an inbound campaign to skip a busy agent when they are remote agents? Also if from a softphone an agent marks themselves as away is there anyway for VICIdial to detect this and skip them when cycling the agent queue for an inbound?

Thanks in advance,

Alex Gritton

[williamconley]

You're attempting to turn a remote agent into a logged in agent.

At present there are no controls or detectors for either of these features. Apparently no one has wanted them enough to pay for them.

I would expect it to be possible to build a "skip to the next agent NOW" method for agents whose calls are immediately terminated (busy, wrong number, whatever). But do remember that a "don't bother calling them because they are busy" requires that the system know they are busy. As remote agents, ordinarily they are not actually connected to this system and the only way to find out they are busy ... is to call them.

If, however, you are using remote agents whose phones are still registered to this vicidial server, I suppose it would be possible to build a routine that checked for busy on that phone and pre-emptively kills this call without bothering and skips to the next agent.

It would also be possible to build an "i'm busy" signal from the phone system that this user is on to "deactivate" the remote agent in question so that they would not be sent a call in the first place (or perhaps just show them as on a call similar to if they were on a call from Vicidial, which avoids calling agents it already has busy).

So it all depends, really, on how this remote agent is connected to and can communicate with the Vicidial server.