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Call Scenarios and Applications
A-78 Issue 7 March 1998
15. User Scenarios - Phantom Calls
If agents are handling faxes or email in addition to voice calls, then phantom calls
can be used to queue these jobs for agents, along with any existing voice calls.
In this example, an ASAI application is notified when an incoming email is
received. It then places a phantom call from a hunt group (ext. 3700) to the Split,
holding the agents (ext. 3900). The hunt group 3700 is used to hold the stations
(Administered Without Hardware, or AWOH) that can be used to place Phantom
Calls. The ECS selects an available station (ext. 3701) in hunt group 3700 and
places a call from that AWOH station to VDN 3802. VDN 3802 queues the call to
split 3900 at low priority.
Voice calls that arrive use VDN 3801, which queues the calls to split 3900 at high
priority. Voice calls are given priority because callers expect a quicker answer. A
15 minute wait in queue for a voice call on hold is considered long, but a 15
minute turn-around for email is considered fast. The other reason to give callers
priority is that they are tying up the trunks to the call center.
When there are no higher priority calls in the queue, and an agent (ext. 3901)
becomes available in split 3900, the Phantom Call alerts station 3901. The
application knows to put the email on the screen associated with station 3901,
and to use 3rd Party Answer, so a CMS or a monitoring ASAI application knows
that the agent has started working on the request made in the email.
When the agent at 3901 finishes the reply to the email (or whatever action is
appropriate), the application uses 3rd Party Disconnect to take down the call and
make the agent available again.