Agent login with random webphone

[ccabrera]

In all of our modern installs, we are always using webphones over softphones, since they allow us to do a quicker deployment with zero configuration on the agent side. This simplifies the process by a lot.

However, there's still one big chance of human error, and that is the common confusion about whether to enter the phone/pass or login/pass when logging in. Many of our clients believe they need to create a new phone for every agent, and even though that's possible, they end up creating maybe thousands of phone extensions which are never used because the agents they created them for are no longer working in the callcenter.

I know you can pre-assign a phone for each user and set up the options.php so that when they login, they only need to enter the login/pass and skip the phone, but still, it would be easier if there where no phones for the agent to worry about.

So I was thinking: what if when an agent logs in, the system assigns them a random phone which isn't in use at the time? That way, we could only create a maximum of 200 phones (believing there wouldn't be more than 200 agents simultaneously), and then forget about them. Since we don't care about the phone, but rather about the user, I believe this would be a good idea: it would simplify agent training and avoid general confusion when logging in.

Before I start to create any kind of patch for this, I wanted to make sure this wasn't already an existent feature, so any comments about this idea would be apreciated.

[carpenox]

It isn't a feature to my knowledge, however would it be able to be used when using user login first and have the random phone assigned to the user settings phone login and pass entries, therefore only having to login with the user info? The simpler solution used by most currently is creating users with phones to match, numbers rather than names and just switching that user to the new employee from the one removed. Only having to change the name in user settings.... It's a good idea though if it can apply the phone to user settings.

[okli]

I believe this will be very useful feature and definitely solves a lot of manual work for large call centers, where manually assigning phones to agents adds a lot of overhead and is prone to user errors.

Would imagine option to create one or more pools of extensions/phone alias, and when a user is created, the corresponding pool is selected. Then upon agent login, the first unused phone from the corresponding pool is selected without agent having to enter phone/phone alias.

The reason for pools is that sometimes there is preferred server or set of servers for a group of agents or a campaign, especially for campaigns with premium leads and low or no dropped calls allowed, which requires to group agents on the same server, PLLB is not that flexible for the purpose.