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I'm having trouble understanding how the predictive dialing alogorithm deals with agents dialing across multiple servers.

Let's say I have 80 agents all on the same outbound campaign and I put 20 phones on server 1, 20 on server 2, 20 on server 3, and 20 on server 4.

Is the dialer predictive dialing with a count of all 80 agents, or does it treat each server as an individual dialing pool, dialing for 20 agents on server 1,2,3,and 4 respectively?

Additionally, lets say I have ratio dialing set to 2.0, does that mean a total of 160 calls will be placed at any given time, 40 on each server... how is that handled programatically?

What happens if 30 people answer on server 1, how does the system decide where to route the extra 10 people? I imagine it uses IAX to send the calls to a server with open agents... but how exactly does it decide.

You pretty much got it already. Each server will dial for the number of agents on the local server, but the answered calls will go to the agent on any server that is next in line to take a call(yes, this is over IAX).

Ok, so in my example it's not dialing with a pool of 80 agents, its dialing with 4 pools of 20 agents?

EDIT: And how does the system determine which server is "next in line"?

It's not the server that is next in line, it is the agent. That determination is made by whatever you have set in the "Next Agent Call" setting.

Ahh of course, that was an obvious answer. I hate to be obtuse here but I just want to confirm the first part of my question, in my example it's not dialing with a pool of 80 agents, its dialing with 4 pools of 20 agents?

As always thank you for all the help and insight you provide.

It all depends on how you have everything set up, in most setups yes that is how it works. But you could also have agent-only servers and dialing-only servers where it would balance dial wherever the available outbound lines are.

Interesting... We'll have to explore that and see what works best for our situation... Thank you very much.