Outdialing

[chadd39]

Is anyone doing outdialing through the contact center. Specifically, we would like to use it for appointment reminders.

A rep would never be involved. We would have about 25 calls a night. The phone numbers would be dialed and a canned WAV file would be played. The date and time of the appointment would be played back to the caller also. This would be pulled from the database when the phone number is and saved to a CP field..

Thanks

[gulu]

I know that contact center does not support automated campaigns is 4.66. But I think there is a way you could do that by setting up phones that don't have agents behind them. ECC will make the call and before it transfers to these agents it will play a script and then hang up.

You should talk to ShoreTel support. They should be able to help you.

[chadd39]

I know it can be done, I was just wondering if anyone has ever done it.

[gulu]

You should ask ShoreTel about that

[Contractor]

I've done it.

Its a little weird the way it has to be done, you will need a DB (to import the numbers you want to outdial) and you will need to buy a license upgrade for your contact center (or at least you used to).

[chadd39]

Thanks for the input. We have 10 outbound dial licenses already with our ECC. Is that what you mean by upgrading licenses?

Also, how did you kick off the beginning of dialing the numbers.

[gulu]

I think you have what you need in term of licenses.
If I understand correctly, you need to set up 10 phones that don't have agents working on them. Then you set up the dial list to call some numbers from an external database.

You need to set it up so that the call goes to a script before going to the agents where it plays a file or does whatever you want done. The final action in the script is hang up so the call never gets to the agents.

Hope this helps

[Sarsin]

It will "work", as long as you don't want to report on it. You have a dummy agent logged into the outbound group to get it to dial, and have the dial list play a CC script before connecting to the agent. The script will play your prompt and then hang up.

However, as far as ECC is concerned, every call is now a failure because they didn't talk to an agent. So if you report on it, every call will fail. Because of that, you have to set the retries to 0.

It can work, it's just a little....special. A little birdie told me that a future version might support unattended dialing.

[Victor]

I am currently doing exactly what you are trying to do. We had to write a script that writes back to our database at different stages during the playback so we could report what happened. The Shoretel system is unable to distinguish between a busy signal, disconnect or connected call. Everything is a failed call. Good Luck