[Asterisk-Users] Predictive Dialers

[mattf]

Hello,

Thanks for the long description, Sorry about the European guess, my last
contact involving shady-dial was with someone in France using it with about
10 agents who seemed to know a heck of a lot about it. :)

As for VICIDIAL being turnkey, the VICIDIAL portion of the astguiclient
suite is still at version 0.5(working on 0.6 as we speak), but it is
production quality, and is actually pretty close to where a non-Asterisk
person could realisticly be expected to run it day-to-day. The one small
thing that it is missing is a GUI lead loading module. we had a simple
web-based one included in an early version but one of our clients managed to
load one list in the wrong formats several times, and it took us half the
day to straighten it out, so we just removed the feature and take the 5
minutes a week to load the leads for him(he's a really small operation so it
doesn't take long, other than that, we are hands off on that system). We
will eventually make the lead-loader a separate GUI app that will be very
stupid-proof. 

The major things we are working on right now for VICIDIAL are adding yet
more stats to the administration website and changing the way the leads are
organized and distributed to the agents to speed the system up and allow for
more features in future versions. We are also tinkering with some limited
predictive-dialing(allowing an auto-dialer to call more than one line per
agent and then allocating the calls that aren't busy, disconnected or
telco-voicemail[UK-only] to the first available agent) but that is still in
the testing phases and we aren't sure of the agent capacity with that
feature enabled. 

Speaking of capacity, we have had up to 36 agents dialing on a single
system(with a total of 70 agents dialing on a single campaign across 3
Asterisk servers using a single MySQL server for the database) using the
currently released VICIDIAL code, and in our internal offices we are
averaging about 200,000+ calls placed per month.

VICIDIAL is limited to SIP client phones with Zaptel as the outgoing
channels, while we do not plan on offering any other protocols, it may be
possible to alter the code to fit other protocols if you have the time.
VICIDIAL is also completely dependant upon the GUI client written in perl/TK
to function. The GUI client runs on Win32 and Xwindows UNIX and is used to
control calls, display lead information, start and stop recording, park and
retrieve calls, do thrid party conference or transfers and launch custom web
pages.

If you or anyone else has any more questions, let me know.

Thanks,

MATT---



-----Original Message-----
From: C. Maj [mailto:cmaj-SPAM at freedomcorpse.com]
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2004 7:23 PM
To: 'asterisk-users at lists.digium.com'
Subject: RE: [Asterisk-Users] Predictive Dialers


On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, mattf waxed:

> - Shady-dial (http://shadydial.sourceforge.net/)
> 	Lead by some nice Europeans, they have a beta of it up and running
> supposedly handling up to 10 agents per server, although I'm not sure of
> exactly what level of 'Predictive' the dialer is(whether it detects
> voicemail/answering machines and such). This dialer alters the code of
> Asterisk and is dependant upon PostgreSQL as a database backend. There is
> some documentation on installation and usage and it is released mostly
under
> the GPL. This dialer does not restrict what kind of phones you can use
with
> it(I'd love to hear more from them or people using this system on the
> specifics of their project)

Damn, I wish I was European some days !  Stupid Bush.  But
alas, I am an imperialist American, whose lowly shady dial
is really the bare bones of predictive dialers.

I have been customizing the system for a client, however,
and can't decide yet how much should go back into the
project CVS.  Of course, any changes to the * code base will
always be there; specifically these are changes to allow
phone key results to PostgreSQL.  I think the rest have been
incorporated thru the bug tracker by now as they were
generic enough to be useful by others.

The changes outside CVS are many, including reporting, book
management, and utilizing 2 line LCD displays for name and
address information.  The code is all still written in Tcl.
But while the core dialing routines will be updated in CVS,
it's very much customized for this client's particular
needs in other areas, so I'm not sure all of that code will
make it back in.  However, I am planning to fork off my
*-Tcl manager interface in the very near future, since it's
functional enough to be useful in other projects of mine.
That will probably be released under a BSDish license soon.

There is no capacity yet for answering machine detection,
and frankly, none is planned.  The predictive nature is
simply counting the agents, counting the calls (busy, no
answer, timeout, etc.), timing the calls, and making sure
the abandon rate doesn't get too high.

Currently, the only known system that I'm aware of has been
running 12 hours a day for the past few months with 6 agents.
I am rolling out another one next month of the same size for
the same client.  Connections between the dialer(s) and the
main switch is over IAX, but the agents use analog phones so
those are Zaptel channels.  You could probably use any
connection you want, tho.

It's pretty much hands off at this point, except when
someone gets upset by my music on hold selection.  (I
personally think that Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
rule.)

For something similar to shady dial, take a look at this:

    http://www.predictivedialers.com/products/index.html

> - VICIDIAL (http://astguiclient.sf.net/)
> 	Lead by my company, we are currently developing our 6th production
> release of a one-call-at-a-time dialer(this is NOT predictive). We have
> placed over one million calls through this system in the last 12 months
> mostly to the UK and Australia. It has complete installation instructions,
> full web-based administration as well as a cross-platform GUI client. It
is
> mostly written in perl, runs on top of an unaltered Asterisk codebase, is
> dependant on a MySQL as it's backend database and is released under the
GPL.
> If you use this you are limited to SIP clients and Zaptel channels. There
> are currently 6 companies that are using this system in production
> envoronments that I know about.(I'd love to hear from other companies
using

Matt--

Is VICIDIAL a turn key system ?  Shady dial is getting closer,
but still not there yet.  I mean, I can't ship somebody a
big brown box with instructions and have that be it.

--Chris


-- 
Chris Maj, Rochester
cmaj_at_freedomcorpse_dot_com
Pronunciation Guide: Maj == May
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