Connect Vicidial server to external database

[Two8nine]

Hi,

We're a sixty odd seat call center, currently a mix of in-house and UCCX. Not been happy with UCCX and are considering switching to Vicidial.

I have the manuals, as well as a testing environment set up, and the system looks promising, however, I have a number of questions I've been unable to find in the manuals or online. Hoping you can point me in the right direction.

The biggest question I have is whether it's feasible to bypass the Vicidial lists and send contacts from an external DB into campaigns (and subsequently the agent screens) in realtime. The reason for this is that our client's requirements extend beyond what UCCX (and I suspect Vicidial) are capable of. These features include things like integrated sales handling, catalogs, kills (the immediate suppression of a record, which may not be called again for an arbitrary, by campaign time period.), N-Day handling (i.e. how long since a record was closed before it can be called again. These hold times are defined within campaigns, but extend beyond them. So if a record in campaign x has a 90 day hold, it must be held in all campaigns that it appears in.)

To accomplish the above, we have built our own campaign management server. It takes care of the creation and maintenance of lists and campaigns, as well as the bulk of reporting and sales handling. What it does is at the start of a shift, it iterates through available records, applies any relevant calling rules, and produces a callable list per campaign. Then it runs a service that sends callable records directly to an agent who is a assigned to a matching campaign within the call center software (csq and skill in uccx). This call appears as an inbound call to the agents, in UCCX agent desktop, answering this call triggers the outbound call to the contact, though this process is not essential. (Really, just straight up presenting a contact would be better.) The agent can then proceed with the call, and enter a custom disposition (which Vicidial already seems to support much better than UCCX.) The rest (sales and client specific stuff) is handled by a in-browser page sent from our campaign server to the agents (which Vicidial also seems to support.)

Long winded, hopefully that makes sense.

Appreciate any thoughts.

[mflorell]

Any call made by an agent has to be in a list somewhere in the VICIdial system. But that doesn't mean that you can't trigger agents to take calls from and external system using a lead that is added right before the call. We have several clients that use the Agent API to trigger calls in the agent screen on-demand(see the "external_dial" function):
http://vicidial.org/docs/AGENT_API.txt

For example:
http://server/agc/api.php?source=test&u ... &focus=YES

You can use the "vendor_id" field as your system's uniqueid so that it is easier to bring up the lead in your system through the web form. There's also a campaign setting to allow you to queue up these manual dial calls per agent.


If you don't want to send calls to specific agents, you can still send leads to be dialed in a campaign using the Non-Agent API and even insert them directly ingo the dialing hopper(see the "add_lead" function):
http://vicidial.org/docs/NON-AGENT_API.txt

For example:
http://server/vicidial/non_agent_api.ph ... riority=97


Hopefully one of those two options will work for what you are looking to do.

[Two8nine]

Much appreciated, gives me something to work from.