Sytel Predictive Dialer

[Former Member]

Greetings Wise Wizards,

We have at the moment a so called testing licence for Sytel's Predictive Dialer with minimal configurable options. Has anyone any experience with this type of Dialer? I'm trying to get it up and running like it is advertised.

Answering machine detection (AMD) isn't working, not for faxes either. According to Sytel, it should be done in SAP SC, can't seem to find a field where. All the other sites tell me that this funcion is provided by Sytel.

The Dialer isn't making more calls out then there are agents loggod into the Campaign.

In SC I've added a new Dialer. Type -> SytelPredictive, Address -> Core VU IP (is this correct?).

According to Sytel, prompt files can be added/configured. My system is missing the correct folder, so I made one where the Dialer should pick those files up. Added files and named them to those what the Dialer should be looking for. Again, not working.

I'm this close on giving up, but our customer wants it so bad, because it's the next best thing since sliced bread .

If anyone could help me I'd be so happy

PS: I'm also in talks with Syttel's Support.

Kind Regards,

Alder Tsvetkov

[alexander_kupke · Accepted solution]

Hi Alder,

Configuration is not limited, to my knowledge Sytelco Call Gem Dialer Plugin (thats the longish official name) is limited to max two Agents in test mode. At least that was what I had at my last Dialer installation. You should be aware that with only two Agents you will never see true predictive behaviour, as all the statistics involved need something to work with, In the past Sytelco recommended at least 50 Agents per campaign. Do not get me wrong, it will do its statistics and prediction with two agents as well, but with such a small agent pool, predictive dialing will look a lot like progressive or power dialing.

Furthermore there is not much configuration to do in the Dialer itself, All you can see when adding the Dialer to SAP Contact Center is all what you get and need. The Address btw. is not the Core VU IP but the Dialer Servers IP Address (To be specific, the IP you bound the dialer to). Even for testing I absolutely do not recommend installing the Dialer to any SAP Contact Center Application Server, but using a dedicated Server (or at least VM) for this.

I cannot tell about the Prompt files for the dialer, we never had a need for them. I honestly would have to check with Sytelco documents for this.

Answering Machine Detection is a field which had quite some discussions to it, I remember quite long talks with developers from all sides.

Here I can only reference to knowledge from the past, meaning as it work the last years.

In the past (Very Old Wicom Times) this worked only with Audiocodes Mediant 2000 Gateways, more specific with those in H.3232 flavour. The detection was actually done in the Mediant´s DSP. Talking to all involved vendors about two years ago the conclusion was, It did not work reliably any more with the quality of modern phone lines (several things as for example noise patterns had been used to detect answering machines, You simply don´t have those any more.)

As we are talking VoIP nowadays, it does not work at all. It is of course possible to recognise a busy, due to signaling, it should also be possible to recognize a fax machine, but all those require a connection (and this also means a connected agent anyhow as you are not suppossed to hold an outbound call before connecting to an agent, but without connection you would not have answering or fax machine audio to analyze. *).

Recognizing anything from here would require some DSP power. Possible places to do this would be Gateways, SBCs or the MRS.

Except for the Gateway mentioned above, I am not aware of anyone working today, and especially working in this environment.

I am not aware of any changes to this in latest versions, but I might be wrong.

BR

Alexander

* (In most countries there are also legal limitations. In the default SAP Contact Center Settings for an Outbound Campaign, you have to set an Abandon ratio and a respective timeout which is 2 seconds as default, meaning having no free agent for a predictive dialed call, the call is disconnected after 2 seconds as a "Ghost call" and increases the overdial rate, which is limited to 0 to, 5, in latest versions I think up to 10 percent.)

[Former Member]

Hi,

Haven't asked a question in a while, thought I'd do that now .

Question is about "Abandon Tirmout (s)", does it really drop the call after just 2.0 seconds (max value)? If the dialer overdials and has more customers then free agents, we'd like to keep the customer on hold and play them some music or some appropriate prompt till an agents gets free. And what happens if I put it on 0 seconds. Will it drop the call immediatly or keep it on hold till a free agents is available?

Kind Regards,

Alder

[alexander_kupke]

Hi Alder,

yes indeed, after those maximum 2 seconds the call is dropped and accounted for in the overdial rate.

Background idea for this is related to legal limitations in some countries regarding usage of outbound dialers. I do not know all the details, but for some countries, e.g. the UK there are legal limits for an overdial rate you can work with, 2 or 3 % as far as I can remember.

In other coutnries for example it is not allowed to call a customer and queue them because of no free agents (This is what is valid for most situations of Outbound Dialing in Germany for example).

Those are the reasons why there simply is no such queuing and prompt playing intended.

Furthermore, if you would just dial customers and keep a number of outbound calls in queue to play prompts, why would you go by using a predictive dialer at all.

Also with the overdial rate set to a sensible value, why bother about situations at all. This will not even affect a whole lot of calls overall plus for those calls you still have good chances to get a busy, no answer or answering machine situation (which is also something you cannot properly cover with playing a prompt for a queued outbound call, imagine the called persons enjoyment of having just minutes of prompts on his voicemail)

BR

Alexander

[Former Member]

Thank you Alexander for your answer. Turned out, it was an internal system failure with one of our gateways.

On the other hand, good news everyone, I've got more questions

1. There are 2 numbers configured for one client, lets say a mobile number and a deskphone number. Now, the dialer tryes the mobile number, can't reach it. Will it try the deskphone number also or go straight  to a new customer after the mobile number?

2. Is it configurable to answer direct calls, when one is just logged in to a campaign, but does not have an active call? At the moment it shows busy, even though an agent hasn't got an active call in progress.

3. Scenario: A customer has an unanswered call from agent A from a campaign. The customer calls back. Agent B from the same campaign, who is also answering queue calls, answers the customer. Is it possible to display the same information to Agent B that was displayed to Agent A, who made the first call out? The same campaign information I mean.

These questions are a pain, I know. I'm asking those because I haven't seen a fully functional SAP CCtr campaign with the Sytel predictive dialer making the calls. Any know how is much apprreciated.

Kind Regards,

Alder

[alexander_kupke]

Hi,

about question 1. check the documentation. I am not sure right now, but I think I remember that with predictive dialing a number set as primary number is used. (e.g. teh first number in the dataset)

I am not sure about 2. as well. Except for Preview dialer campaigns this is a quite unlikely situation. and with predictive dialer to work correctly you are blocked while in a campaign. But here as well check if there might be some not so obvious parameter. In predictive dialing this behavior avoids unpredictably "loosing" an agent the dialer took into account for dialing.

Number 3 will only work if you are doing campaigns out of SAP CRM and you might have access to what usually would be the campaign data for inbound here as well. Using only SAP Contact Center campaign data is a completely separate database, not related to any other customer data you might have in the SAP Contact Center (which actually might only be a directory entry)

[Former Member]

Greetings again,

Now another problem has arisen and I can't figure out where it came from. A few weeks back, everything was working fine. Calls were made out without a problem. Now, if an agent joins the campaign, he will get the first customer that is offered to him. He finishes talking, adds a call result and waits for the next customer to be connected. Thing is, that it won't connect. Instead, the agent is thrown out of the campaign and the campaign is marked as "Completed". If I look into the results I see that all the other customers get CTI_CODE_57 (that's a new one for me).

The cause indicates that I'm not authorized to use some sort of equipment. Also, the cause 57 goes along with SIP error 403 - forbidden.

Much appreciated, if someone could help.

Kind regards,

Alder

[alexander_kupke]

No idea about that particular message, never seen it.

But you might want to take a look into campaing data in database, especially the numbers you try to call and compare with routing in SAP CCtr.

You may also want to check CD log in at least trace or better debug level, to see if an outbound attempt was made (with predictive dialer the agent will not see this usually), which routing decision was made, which gateway was supposed to be used and if there might have been issues in general.

BR

Alexander