too many NAs?

[eliyahu]

I've installed VICIDIAL for our call center, and we're slowly migrating from a dialogic-based predictive dialer that we were having problems with. I just noticed that it seems like VD is producing too many NAs from calls... with my other dialer, I usually get 25%-40% of all total calls being Busy or No Answer.. with VD for a comparable list, I get at least 60% NA, and a miniscule amount of B (1%). The NA timeout for VD is set very high, to 30 seconds. It's lower for the other dialer.

Is it possible that there's something wrong with my termination provider?
I use IAX trunking to vitelity, who have very good service and good rates.
I can't think of what else it might be. It seems very odd that VD is picking up so few busy signals...

Do other people running VD have similar ratios?

[mflorell]

NA can include Disconnects as well as Invalid numbers and Congestion. So if you run out of bandwidth in any way it could be coded as an NA.

The timeout is defined by you in the campaign detail screen, you can set it as low or as high as you like.

[eliyahu]

By the way matt, just wanted to take the chance and thank you for writing this awesome piece of software. I've started tinkering with it already and hopefully at some point in the future I'll be able to contribute as well...

I see I was a little unclear in my post.. I meant to say that I myself set it high to 30 seconds...

Anyway it looks like with your advice I just fixed the problem.. I changed from ulaw to gsm, and the NAs fell to 24%, which is normal.. I'm keeping an eye on the bandwith with iftop, and will try to do some network testing to see how large of a load we can handle. I had set it to ulaw hoping to save asterisk the transcoding work for meetme.

[mflorell]

Thanks for the compliments. I'm glad you are getting your setup working.

[binbash]

Same problem i'm encountering , .. only i get a lot of B and NA .. but the NA tops them all ... like 70% of total calls made are NA .. and the leads when dialled manually, .... are not NA's. Termination provider has a lot of clients and terminates well to the US on other sites.

Any insights .. are welcomed

[marvin]

any idea on how much should be standard rate for the NA?

[mflorell]

Depends on the quality of your list, one client of mine was running 2 campaigns, one with over 100,000 very poor quality leads, and one with 10,000 leads from an active customer list. The NAs were 85% of the poor list, while they were 40% of the good quality list, on the same dialer.

[marvin]

thanks! ... its just kinda alarming on my side seeing this high rate of NA's
i thought that its only me thats experiencing this.
my boss really insist that we have a good quality of leads(he said that his pay much for this leads).

[mflorell]

Keep in mind that if your carrier cannot place a call because of CONGESTION or UNAVAILABLE lines, that those will show up as NAs too. This happens a lot to call centers that are dialing heavily and may account for some of your NAs.

[tbenson]

Here are some links to pages that help you calculate Codecs and Bandwidth consumed.

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk+bandwidth+iax2
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Bandwidth+consumption

One thing people tend to overlook when using VoIP is that its realtime communication. So once you do the math in these pages consider EVERY packet of traffic not for VoIP is going to reduce your numbers and/or call quality. Don't forget to consider the inbound calls and adapt level, as calls ringing into or out of the server before terminating to a conference room will also consume bandwidth.

If the circuit is Asymetric (DSL, Cable, etc.) then you should expect even less as simultanious upstream exponentially reduces available downstream. IE a good rule of thumb is if you have a 6Mbps Downstream and a 784Kbps Upstream do your math as if the circuit is a 784K Symetric Circuit instead.

Thus even if you change your codec today, and reduce the amount of NA's your getting, If ANYONE in the building uses the same circuit for Internet access while your around 40-60% utilization then you can expect call quality to go down and NA's to rise at the drop of a hat.