Outbound - managing multiple progressive campaigns

[Adam_W]

Firstly, this isn't a "how do I get agents to take calls from multiple campaigns at the same time" question, as I know it doesn't (and couldn't) work 

The scenario I have is this:  I have a calling list with records for various customers, which are currently all dealt with under the "Service" campaign.  When the agent makes the call, they have to go into the relevant CRM system to complete customer information.

The challenge is that a subset of the records in the calling list relate to customers which use a different CRM system, which only some of the agents assigned to the campaign are trained on.

Ultimately what I need to do is have a group of agents who can deal with any record, because they are trained on both CRMs, and a group of agents who can only deal with records that relate to the normal CRM system.

The only way I can think of doing this is by splitting it into 2 calling lists and campaigns:

Campaign 1 = CRM 1 Calling List
Campaign 2 = CRM 1 Calling List & CRM 2 Calling List

The only problem with this is that when a campaign callback is scheduled under Campaign 2, only those agents will be able to handle the callback.  Technically anyone in either campaign could handle a callback from CRM 1 Calling List, so restricting these to 2 or 3 agents will have a negative effect on productivity.

Any ideas on a solution to this?

[Adam_W]

Has no-one ever been in a similar situation or have I just not explained it very well? 

[Allan]

Hi,

Do you have a means to ascertain which CRM system the customer resides on? If such a "customer profile" list existed, you may be able to query this.

regards

Allan

[Adam_W]

Yes, it's easy to see which system the customer uses, simply from the company name which is held in a user-defined field in each calling list record.

The challenge though is how to deliver those records to a sub-set of agents that belong to the campaign, while still allowing those agents to make the more general calls as well...

[Allan]

What about writing the rescheduled records for the subset agents into a new table that is a different campaign with only the relevant agents able to take the calls?

[Adam_W]

I could write them to a new calling list, or maybe just make rescheduled records default to the campaign which has the largest number of agents to make the calls.

This might work for calls manually rescheduled by the agents, because in the agent script I could possibly control which campaign the rescheduled record was associated with.  But it won't work for automatically re-scheduled records that don't reach an agent.  These just seem to default to whichever campaign dialled the record.

I'm thinking about just running a stored procedure on the OCS database every half hour or so to associate callbacks/rescheduled records with the right campaign...

[fnunezsa]

Here is my guess:

1) Only ONE campaign
2) TWO agents groups associated with the campaign, let say BothCRMs and OnlyCRM2
3) Assing a RP as the Voice Transfer Destination of the campaign
4) Have a strategy to route calls to agents in BothCRMs or OnlyCRM2 based on a KVP (Company_Name as you stated before). Here you can apply a Routing Rule to split CRM2 calls between the 2 agent groups
5) The same strategy in step 4 would account for re-scheduled records based on a KVP (GSW_RECORD_TYPE=Campaign
Rescheduled or GSW_RECORD_TYPE=Campaign
CallBack) and route those calls the agent group with the largest number on logged in agents

Does it make sense?

[Dionysis]

[quote author=fnunezsa link=topic=6742.msg29370#msg29370 date=1319501900]
Here is my guess:

1) Only ONE campaign
2) TWO agents groups associated with the campaign, let say BothCRMs and OnlyCRM2
3) Assing a RP as the Voice Transfer Destination of the campaign
4) Have a strategy to route calls to agents in BothCRMs or OnlyCRM2 based on a KVP (Company_Name as you stated before). Here you can apply a Routing Rule to split CRM2 calls between the 2 agent groups
5) The same strategy in step 4 would account for re-scheduled records based on a KVP (GSW_RECORD_TYPE=Campaign
Rescheduled or GSW_RECORD_TYPE=Campaign
CallBack) and route those calls the agent group with the largest number on logged in agents

Does it make sense?
[/quote]

This would achieve the goal required, however it would cause large numbers of dropped calls.  The campaign would dial records of both types for all agents, yet half the records can only be dialled by half the agents.  You would very quickly find that a large percentage of the CRM 2 list's records would be dropped or abandoned because the OCS has no concept of the fact that only some of the agents can handle the CRM 2 calls.

Your solution of 2 campaigns is the only way to maintain the efficiency of OCS' algorithms, you could try the agent assignment functionality which is designed to handle exactly this situation, I've never used it though so can't tell you how well it works, or how to use it. 

[Adam_W]

fnunezsa I tried that but as Dionysis says, unfortunately you end up with a lot of dropped calls as the record gets dialled, then potentially the routing strategy realises there is no-one available in that group and drops the call 

From what I know, agent assignment allows agents to be part of multiple campaigns (although only logs them onto the first one that's started), but I don't think it solves the rescheduled records problem.  Say there are only 2 agents in the campaign that deals with both types of record, any automatically rescheduled records would only be called by those few agents, when some of them could potentially be called by the agents in the other campaign too.

I think the only way to do it will be with some custom routine on the database as I'm probably trying to get OCS to do something it's not designed for!

[Allan]

or you can raise a feature request 

[fnunezsa]

You have to be very careful when updating calling list database directly as some records might have been picked up by OCS into the buffer by the time your SP runs and you should not update those records