> Hello All, > > History ~ > I recently took a position with a call center. At the time they had > about 50 agents in a call queue. The queue was setup to ringall. The > agents use Eyebeam softphones. Everything is local lan, no routers, > everything connected via Cisco 3600 10/100 switches. > > Now we are up to about 150 agents, and I have kept everything pretty > much the same way for a couple of reasons. However, those reasons are > slowly drifting away and it's become the right time for me to start > questioning some of the previous configuration. > > Here's the scenario~ > 150 agents, all are commission based sales reps. 99% of the calls are > answered within the first ring. the rest are answered between the > second and third ring. Never in my 4 months with the company has a > queue call been in the queue more then 20 seconds. > > Problem~ > Several times a week or sometimes a day, the reps will tell me that > the same call will be answered by 3 or 4 or 5 reps, and none of them > get the inbound audio. Asterisk only shows 1 of the reps actually > connecting the call, however the call logs in Eyebeam for all 5 reps, > show that they took the call and were connected for a short period of > time before disconnecting the call because there is no inbound audio. > > Point of discussion~ > Is there really a reason to maintain a queue? With the companies > growth they are now discussing the option of sending certain > affiliates to certain sales reps. Am I better off using ring groups? > Additionally I am working towards running as much of my configs via > mysql as possible and turning up multiple servers to handle the calls. > So far we have reached 130 simultaneous calls on one server, and about > 10,000 calls processed during a 12 hour day. > > Thanks for reading. I look forward to hearing peoples views on this...
On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Gregory Malsack <gmalsack at coastalacq.com>wrote:> Here's the scenario~ >> 150 agents, all are commission based sales reps. 99% of the calls are >> answered within the first ring. the rest are answered between the second >> and third ring. Never in my 4 months with the company has a queue call been >> in the queue more then 20 seconds. >> >> Problem~ >> Several times a week or sometimes a day, the reps will tell me that the >> same call will be answered by 3 or 4 or 5 reps, and none of them get the >> inbound audio. Asterisk only shows 1 of the reps actually connecting the >> call, however the call logs in Eyebeam for all 5 reps, show that they took >> the call and were connected for a short period of time before disconnecting >> the call because there is no inbound audio. >> >Which version of Asterisk? Have you looked for solutions to the root problem? I don't run any servers with that many agents, but have never run into issues like this with a few dozen. Large ring groups can become unwieldy and problematic themselves. There's also a limit to how long the entire dial string can be, though I can't remember what that size is. You said everything is on a LAN, but have you looked at the possibility of issues between switches? Can you examine the logs of bad calls and see if the failures happen on a specific switch in the network, or other correlation like that? Do you use VLANs or layer 3 switching? -- Carlos Alvarez TelEvolve 602-889-3003 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20130328/d0fa10c1/attachment.htm>
On Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:55:45 -0500 Gregory Malsack <gmalsack at coastalacq.com> wrote:> > History ~ > > I recently took a position with a call center. At the time they had > > about 50 agents in a call queue. The queue was setup to ringall. > > The agents use Eyebeam softphones. Everything is local lan, no > > routers, everything connected via Cisco 3600 10/100 switches. > > > > Now we are up to about 150 agents, and I have kept everything > > pretty much the same way for a couple of reasons. However, those > > reasons are slowly drifting away and it's become the right time for > > me to start questioning some of the previous configuration.Have you considered switching the strategy to roundrobin or leastrecent? You could give it a very low agent timeout (like 5 seconds), so the caller doesn't have to wait long if it has to ring a few people. -- C. Chad Wallace, B.Sc. The Lodging Company http://www.lodgingcompany.com/ OpenPGP Public Key ID: 0x262208A0
Hello Gregory, I wouldn't say this is a typical scenario for using a ringall queue, especially if the agent set gets larger and larger. On the other side, a ringgroup won't solve the issue of ringing all those phones at once. What I would be looking into, considered the motivation of your agents, is to split the system into more than one queue and send the calls randomly to each queue. If everybody is busy you get out and retry. This should not impact call answer times as long as you have 30/40 people available per queue - but your box will handle a fraction of the load and you can easily partition such a system on multiple boxes. Just my two cents, l. 2013/3/28 Gregory Malsack <gmalsack at coastalacq.com>> Hello All, >> >> History ~ >> I recently took a position with a call center. At the time they had about >> 50 agents in a call queue. The queue was setup to ringall. The agents use >> Eyebeam softphones. Everything is local lan, no routers, everything >> connected via Cisco 3600 10/100 switches. >> >> Now we are up to about 150 agents, and I have kept everything pretty much >> the same way for a couple of reasons. However, those reasons are slowly >> drifting away and it's become the right time for me to start questioning >> some of the previous configuration. >> >> Here's the scenario~ >> 150 agents, all are commission based sales reps. 99% of the calls are >> answered within the first ring. the rest are answered between the second >> and third ring. Never in my 4 months with the company has a queue call been >> in the queue more then 20 seconds. >> >> Problem~ >> Several times a week or sometimes a day, the reps will tell me that the >> same call will be answered by 3 or 4 or 5 reps, and none of them get the >> inbound audio. Asterisk only shows 1 of the reps actually connecting the >> call, however the call logs in Eyebeam for all 5 reps, show that they took >> the call and were connected for a short period of time before disconnecting >> the call because there is no inbound audio. >> >> Point of discussion~ >> Is there really a reason to maintain a queue? With the companies growth >> they are now discussing the option of sending certain affiliates to certain >> sales reps. Am I better off using ring groups? Additionally I am working >> towards running as much of my configs via mysql as possible and turning up >> multiple servers to handle the calls. So far we have reached 130 >> simultaneous calls on one server, and about 10,000 calls processed during a >> 12 hour day. >> >> Thanks for reading. I look forward to hearing peoples views on this... >> > > -- > _____________________________________________________________________ > -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- > New to Asterisk? Join us for a live introductory webinar every Thurs: > http://www.asterisk.org/hello > > asterisk-users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >-- Loway - home of QueueMetrics - http://queuemetrics.com Test-drive WombatDialer beta @ http://wombatdialer.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20130329/4a7404b1/attachment.htm>