How to move agents in OCS

[Vic]

Hi,

I was asked to come up with a design for one of our customers using OCS where one of the requirements was to be able to move agents from one campaign to another.

Up until now, I was under the impression that agents had to log into a real ACD queue in order to participate in a campaign. So, in order for agents to switch between campaign they would need to either be able to login into different ACD queues or have different agent id's assigned to them, right?

That would be really impractical when you have 1000 agents and 20 campaigns. I was thinking about using URS, but then OCS does not support virtual agent groups, nor can it monitor virtual queues, therefore it would not be able to correctly keep tracks of the statistics for those virtual queues, would it?

So, how does everyone deal with it? I am sure I am not the only one who needs to move agents from one campaign to another!

Any ideas, thoughts, help would be really eally appreciated!

[Ritchie]

Hi Vic, we are experienceing the very same problem.

At the moment we have everything 6.5 except for outbound which is still 5.1. We have all our agents in all Agent Groups in CME, with each Agent Group being a campaign. When an agent switches campaign on the desktop app, the app sends signals to the switch telling it to remove the old skill and add the new one. Because agents are in all groups in CME, campaign manager does not have to be bounced.

The problem facing me on upgrade to OCS 65 is that now CCPulse is the real time reporting tool, and we cannot tell what campaign the agent is in, because according to CCPulse, he is in all of them at once!

At the moment, I do not have a solution, but I am working on it...

[FF]

Ritchie,
This could be solved with the Virtual agent group defined based upon the "ACDQ" over which the agents are logged. The definition is simple and could be done as a Skill definition:
LoggedIn(“QueueNumber@SwitchName”)
Then you could see the real agents login in to an (one at a time) ACDQ inside CCP.

[Ritchie]

Yes thanks you are quite right. I saw this option last week when browsing one of the manuals. I've tried it out and it initially looks promising although you are not able to get stats for each agent logging in, and to see who is logging in you have to use moniter extended status, which does not give you the best view!

But I am looking into it further as I feel it could be quite useful.

[Vic]

Ritchie,

what do you mean "application telling switch to change the skill" You mean your application connects to ASAI link (or Symposium) and can adjust the skill for a particular agent? I did not know you could do that!

[Ritchie]

Well we have Lucent, but I presume you can do a similar thing with whatever system you use. Basically, if you manually go to a turret(extension), log an agent in, and then type in #9xxx# where 'x' is a skill, you will remove the skill. Similarly, if you type in *09xxx#7#, you will add a skill.
Remember that you can't leave an agent with no skill, either add before you remove or always leave the agent with a default skill ie 1.

So, instead of manually pressing the numbers on the turret, incorporate them into your desktop app, so that when an agent logs in to a specific campaign, your app will send the numbers to the switch and change the skill for the agent.

[Vic]

Excellent! I have asked our PBX people and they said that they can do it. But, don't you have to specify "ThisQueue" when you login your agent? I was under the impression that without ThisQueue set, OCS would not count that agent!

[Rory]

There is a setting (just resolved a problem I was having with Meridian default queues) which allows Campaign manager (or OCS) to ignore the queue when an agent logs in.

for v5.1:
login_queue_info = ignore

for OCS:
login_ignore_queue = true

Has some impacts about how you operate but certainly solved outbound only seeing turrets by their default queue on Meridian matching the queue for the campaign.

Rory

[Vic]

Ok, I am really getting confused now!

Let's say I have two agent groups one for each campaign!
If I place my agent in both groups wouldn't OCS see that agent in BOTH groups?

When an agent logs in, how would OCS know which agent group agent is currently working in? If we would have our agent in all the agent groups, wouldn't predictive dialing get all screwed up, because it would think that agent is actually there when in reality the agent is logged into a different ACD queue?

Help! I am relly confused!

[Ritchie]

Well I don't have the above ooptions set, and I have the RP and the Q in as origination DNs in the Agent Group. That way, OCS only sees what agents are in the group by the Q they log into.

I think we do send 'ThisQueue' from the desktop app when logging in. We would get it by looking up the DB I think to see what Q corresponded to the campaign that the agent was logging into.

[Rory]

Vic,

Totally agree. I forgot to mention was that this can only work if an agent is defined within Genesys to one campaign only. Also, it can lead to confusion when trying to manage Symposium skillsets at the same time.

More of a get around than a solution.

Rory