How to have Single Agent use Multiple phone numbers

[bilbob96]

HI, I am a newbie to ViciDial and I have read through the manual and have some concerns and questions.

My install is the latest ViciBox 7.0.4
OpenSuSE Leap v.42.1 64-bit
Kernel v.4.1.13
Asterisk v.11.20.0-vici
DAHDI v.2.10.2
LibPRI v.1.4.14
Amfletec VoiceSync v.1.3.8
OpenR2 v.1.3.3 for MFC/R2 support
ViciDial SVN Trunk v.2.12-533a build 160106-1342 revision 2461

I am a bit confused and I see no topics relating to what I am trying to do so I will explain below.

We use zoiper now and our agents have different caller id's for different services they call out on. We do no inbound. One agent may have 4 sip accounts with a specific caller id on each one. They are outbound tech support only.

We wanted the whisper feature that is available in vicidial so all we want to use is the whisper/barge features, no call recording, no voicemail, no autodialing.

After reading the manual, it seems i would have to set up a different user/phone login for each of the agents sip accounts and they would have to register zoiper each time they changed phones. This would mean the agent would constantly have to login to a specific user to actually use vicidial and allow the managers to monitor then and whisper. Our agents do not make a huge number of calls and all are manually dialed. An average night sees them make about 20 calls.

Am I reading the manual wrong?

1. If I set a phone on zoiper, agent logs into vicidial, can he select which caller id number to use when he dials out manually? If so how?

Sorry for such a newbie question, I hope to have this set up and then integrate the rest of our call center to use vicidial, but this is an important first step in order to convincing my supervisors to start integrating the rest of our business model.

[williamconley]

Your approach is slightly off. You should have the leads segregated into lists based on the product/service you intend to sell. Each list goes in a Campaign specific to that product/service. Those phone number are also associated with "ingroups" so the agents receiving those calls inbound later know what product was pitched.

When an agent wants to call someone and sell them a product or service, they log into the campaign for that product or service and the callerid for that campaign is used automatically on all outbound calls if that is how the campaign is configured (campaign callerid instead of agent callerid). Manual dial from the agent screen, not from the agent's phone. This is a fairly standard use of Vicidial whether you're using autodial (highly recommended) or manual dial (viable, but not very cost-effective).

We train on this regularly.

[bilbob96]

William,
Thank you for the input. I have been busy reading and setting up users, campaigns, groups etc. There is a lot to learn here. Maybe I was not specific enough in my question.

1. All inbound calls go to a third party answering service now.
2. When a customer calls in for service, their name and phone number is transferred to one of our support through chat.
This is not using vicidial now, and it will be a while before we even start to integrate that portion of the business.

Our support people sit and wait for a ticket, once they get a ticket they make an outbound call, with specific caller id, to the customer.

This is where we are wanting to use vicidial, to monitor and whisper on support agents outbound calls. There are no leads in a campaign, I understand that agents can login to a campaign with no leads.

If agent1 got a ticket for service1, he would log into vicidial select the campaign, and manually enter the number to make his call. I understand that.

This means if the agent finished that call and needed to next call out on servic2, then he would logout of vicidial, log back in to the service2 campaign and dial out.

The way I see it my agents could be logging into and out of vicidial on every call they need to make. Please note: these agents field an average of only 20 calls in an 8 hour shift, not knowing which service will require support next means they could possibly have to log out/in vicidial 20 times in a shift to change campaigns.


Thanks for the input, the manuals really help. I have successfully added my users and outbound carrier and can make calls out directly from zoiper, I am still reading about the campaigns and user groups and will have that nailed down soon.

I have also been looking at asterisk, if I am correct I could set specific dial parameters to whisper and barge there, like calling extension500 with 6 attached would initiate whisper, maybe that is a better fit for what I am trying to do, I am still reading as I am a severe newbie here.

[mflorell]

You could also set up Group Aliases, so the agents don't have to log out to change CallerIDs on outgoing manual dial calls.

[bilbob96]

Thanks for all the help here, I finally dug up a thread on bypassing vicidial by adding to the dial plan, this works perfectly for what we need to do right now with one minor hiccup of the caller id not showing properly on our hong kong numbers. I simply added: exten => _33XXX,1,ChanSpy(SIP/${EXTEN:2},qw) to the dial plan, this allows our managers to listen and whisper on calls and the agents dotn need to use vicidial at all.

Now before anyone asks why install vici when we are not going to use it, the answer is we will. I have been wanting to integrate our crm into a vicidial server for quite some time. Whispering was my way to get management to allow me to purchase a server.

Now the fun begins by showing them how we can make our lives much simpler in our sales department by using an autodialer. Right now our agents manually dial through zoiper as they got through our crm for leads.

I have just put in a request for the full versions of both manuals, again, thanks for all the help.