Campaigns Dialing Outside of Hours

[ajax1515]

Hi,

So what we have happening is an outbound dialing campaign runs until the agents are done at 5:30 pm. We set the call time for the campaign to end at 5:30 however quickly realized that the call time filters based on the "lead's" local time... so what's happening is the dialer is still ripping through dials right past 5:30 as long as there is an agent logged into the campaign... problem is all the agents sign out right at that time so we end up with a crapload (that's a technical term I believe) of abandoned calls right at the 5:30 hour. (It's worth mentioning that we have 7 dial servers working on this campaign and have over 300 calls ringing out at any given time)

So what I need is some way to tell the dialer to stop right at 5:30... What I'm going to try to do is just set the campaign to active=N right at 5:29 and see if that works, I'll make an edit here if it does.... but if you folks have a better way to solve my issue I'd love to hear it.

Thanks,

[timatengage]

Hi Ajax,

Have you tried using state call times? All your data will need a 2 letter state so it may be a big job but you can set up different call times for each state. You'll find it all under Admin -> Call Times

Tim

[ajax1515]

Thanks for the advice timatengage, I think that solution probably would work, but like you said it's quite tedious and difficult to change quickly if our calling hours suddenly become different.

What I did that seems to work nicely is write a small script that changes the active value in asterisk.vicidial_campaigs from Y to N... I run this script via crontabs at 5:29PM and the dialer coasts down to a gradual stop over the following minute... This solution seems to work quite nicely. The same script then reactivates the campaign early in the morning to be ready for the next day.