Routing calls to inbound group without answer and MOH

[airflux]

Hi guys,

We would like to set up an inbound quality monitoring campaign (mistery calls) where our agents receives outbound calls originated from other/external contact centers.
Our agents must behave like normal people, not like contact center agents so we can't have music on hold, queue, sounds alert on answer.

The idea is
- the inbound call is routed to the first available agent only if there is one (like inbound group strategy / routing + no agent no queue)
- the caller receives the answer (signal, audio, etc) only when the agent answers it on his softphone (like on hook phone but without queue)
- if there are no agent available or until the our agents answer it the call remains in ringing for a specific amount of time or receives a busy signal (no agents no queue, extension 9995555555 or similar)
- the call is shown on the agent screen when he answer it

I'm trying to mix the phones "on hook" option with the inbound group or DID routing strategy with no success.
If we route the call to an inbound group it gets answered and stays in queue until the agent press answers on his phone.
If we route the call directly to a an agent/phone/custom extensions like dial(sip/phone1&sip/phone2) we can respect the "answer sequence" due to the on hook option without reproducing the MOH but the agent screen doesn't show it and there is no routing strategy.

There is a way to configure Vicidial to behave like that?

[williamconley]

Please remember that your Vicidial Version with Build is essential to providing support. Especially whan asking about features. SVN is useful, but not "The Standard". Bottom left corner of most admin screens.

I'm not sure what you're asking. You described a vicidial ingroup without explaining what must be different, aside from a hint about "quality monitoring" and/or "mystery calls".

It sounds like you just need to put a phone in the trunkinbound context rather than the default context. That phone will then generate inbound calls as if from a carrier rather than outbound calls TO a carrier. The rest of it is still Vicidial.

[airflux]

First of all thank you for the reply.

I've just updated my signature with the missing information. I should update our Vicidial installations too

In short, we need to ruote the incoming call received on a specific DID to an inbound group without playing the music on hold and without answering the call until the agent answer it.
In other terms, the incoming call should never enter a MeetMe room, it should be answered (i mean the sip signal answer()) only when the agent is ready (ie. press answer on phone if the phone has the on-hook option set).
So, the routing should be: incoming inbound call (ringing) -> DID (ringing) -> Inbound Group (still ringing) -> Agent (answered).

[williamconley]

That's a tough request. Vicidial is designed around NOT wasting the time of an agent with a dead call. Until after audio (two-ways) is confirmed (or at least suggested) by a bridged call, Vicidial won't pass a call to an agent. And it answers the call immediately.

That being said, inbound calls are different. They run straight to AGI scipts and eventually land at an agent's meetme room.

In theory it would be possible to alter the system to avoid use of ANSWER to the moment of entering the meetme room, but you'll need to do some testing to see where your roadblocks are. First try routing a call directly to an agent phone from the DID, and don't answer. If the DID agi script answers the call modify the agi script to find where and see what happens when you ... take that out.

You can test this without damaging the rest of the system by creating a new "trunkinbound" context for your new special carrier connection. Name it anything you want. Copy the exiting trunkinbound verbatim except ... change the name of the agi script to one you've copied from the original and modified. Of course, test it before you make any changes to be sure it actually works first. Such as chmod +x if you accidentally remove the executable flag from the file (happens a lot in netbeans).

You can place the new trunkinbound context in system settings (custom dialplan), so no need to edit the extensions.conf directly.

But the agi script ... that you'll have to edit directly on the hd (well, edit a copy, of course).

Happy Hunting.

[airflux]

Maybe I'm wrong but seems like MeetMe needs an already answered call to work correctly, so I started looking somewhere else.

I've found that the asterisk Queue feature handles the call in the way I need, but now the lead needs to be loaded programmagically on the agents screen. In order to do that I think I should use an AGI script, that's correct?
The API switch_lead ("for inbound calls, switches lead_id of live inbound call on agent screen") looks perfect, but it's not available on my old Vicidial installation (my bad).

What do you think about that? Am I heading in the right direction?

[williamconley]

You could create a new extension that will answer the call as it enters the meetme room, unless the call goes into the meetme room and calls the agent from there in which case ... yep. Problem for meetme.

But I do recall the queue module having functionality that would match. Then the challenge is convincing Vicidial that there's a call and it belong with this agent. You could create a queue for each agent and put in an agi watchdog script and generate a fake call to a meetme room when the call answers. Complicated, but viable. Vicidial does have a "nophone" option that may be useful in that regard.