Calls without delay

[earlfox]

Hi, I'm conisdering vicidial for outbound calls in my call center.
I have a question about its functionality since I've never faced with vicidial setup and will be paying someone who do it for me.
Is there a potential way to setup vicidial the way it could call faster than usual? I mean usually on all call-centers where I worked I've seen how much agents sitting without calls sometimes - you can notice that sometimes agent get another call the next second the current call ends, and sometimes agent have to wait 5-10 seconds or even more to receive another call.

And I don't want these 5-10 seconds to be lost. So is there a way to setup vicidial, to work in the most aggressive ways so that the agent couldn't had to lose even a second?

About losing a time with vicidial - I found out not only short delays between calls can cause time losing, also things like wrong answering machine recognition (because sometimes agents hear answering machine and have to choose it in hangup menu). Is there any way to make harder setup for vicidial so that there could be zero chance for agent to meet answering machine?

[williamconley]

1) Welcome to the Party Earl!

2) Dialing aggressively is not recommended (but certainly possible). Of course, you'll drop a LOT of calls but it is possible to have several calls waiting for agents if you want to do so. But you'll "piss off" the recipients (and eventually the FCC ...).

3) Answering Machine Detection is a free module in Asterisk that is installed in Vicidial (thanks to Kumba's brilliant .iso available at Vicibox.com) out of the box. Unfortunately, the Free AMD is only about 70% effective. An aggressive Linux/Vicidial/Asterisk technician can sometimes get it over 80%, though, if that's good enough for you. Otherwise you can pay for channels from Sangoma's Netborder product (not cheap, but I hear it's supposed to be better than the free version). Zero Chance? ONLY with "paid" channels. Very Low Chance? possible .. but you'll likely have to pay for channels or take the risk of hanging up on a lot of Humans as well (ie: if the system is set to aggressively guess "AM" a lot more often, you'll likely catch a few humans in that Answering Machine net).

[earlfox]

willianconley, thanks for comprehensive response, its really helped me to understand ViciDial better.

Hi everyone again. Since the last post I reconsidered my strategy and now I'm thinking about setting up the ViciDial myself without any technician help. And forget about my intentions to get an aggressive dialer - now I need usual default working solution for one agent seat with minimal setup. Since I'm experienced Linux user, this shouldn't be too difficult.

I'm using ViciBox.i686-4.0.1.preload.iso as my start up out-of-box package. Installation went through successfully, and I'm aleady having access to administration panel. I've setup the campaigns and now I'm having this error: "Sorry, your phone login and password are not active in this system, please try again:"

I've created 3 test users and I've been changing the settings of campaign, lists and users, and using administration panel for 3 hours but can't get inside the agent dialing interface




Also I have question - if I have regular SIP provider who allows simultaneous 10 calls, with pay-per-minute plan, does this gonna be enough for ViciDial to serve one telemarketing agent?

Another question which is real hard to me! How to setup that given SIP-provider to be used for dialing? I've modified sip.conf, but don't know whether I should config asterisk further. Would you recommend me the ways of testing asterisk before trying to make ViciDial work?

I think that now Asterisk is down for some reason - since I can't login using Zoiper-VoIP client and internal IP of the vicidial server as SIP-server.


Right now I don't know anything about vicidial. So that I wouldn't bother you could you suggest some very good manual so that after reading it I would know everything about it?

[williamconley]

"Sorry, your phone login and password are not active in this system, please try again:"

You are using the wrong user or password. The agent screen login and login password fields from the Admin->Phones must match on the first login page (there are two pages that ask for user/pass, they are not for the same information).

10 Lines should be plenty for a single agent unless you are playing a recorded message prior to sending the call to an agent.

asterisk -R at the command line will tell you if asterisk is running. if it is not, you need to stop and possibly reinstall. pay attention for any errors and don't "just keep going" if an error occurs. Read the installation instructions more than once. Install several times until you get it right (after all, it's free!)

[ZoVoS]

Depends on your client base. if they actually care about what you have to offer you can just shove all dropped calls into an in-group and have people QUEUE up to have a agent talk to them

[Acidshock]

Not setting this up for a family member are you Earl? I had someone asking me about setting up VICI for a 1-2 agent setup. They were pretty sure their father was going to do it and his name was Earl too lol. Probably one hell of a coincidence but still funny nonetheless!

Anyhow if you are only talking 1-4 agents you can almost not go wrong with almost any setup at 10 calls max. I doubt you will even run into any issues from carriers. I definately recommend you buy the VICIDIAL manuals though. They are well worth the money and answer a lot of basic questions and scenarios.