Greetings.
I need help from you lot, the pbx installers, programmers and service techs, to come up with a better way to explain how my dialer/ivr interconnects with phone systems.
All day long I talk to IT managers, executive stakeholders and phone system vendors about what I need in the way of connectivity; about 80% of the time I get blank stares or confused head-scratching.
Let me explain my connectivity.
Predictive dialing should be straight forward - I have phone lines connected directly to the dialer from the CO - usually PRI - used for all outbound calling.
The phone system is connected to the dialer via a wink-start T1; this is a cross over cable between the dialer's T1 port and a T1 port on the phone system. This tie-line connection is set up in a trunk group accessible by the agent from their desk phone. The path is nailed up between the agent and the dialer for as long as they are logged in. When detecting a human answer the dialer connects the call to the open audio path that the agent established. Make sense?
It seems that the PBX techs I deal with more often than not have a hard time getting their head around the tie line between the dialer and the phone system - is there a better way to explain it from your perspective?
The second connections, which often causes the most problems at the time of install is inbound blending lines.
When an agent is logged onto the dialer taking outbound calls most often they are not going to be able to get calls from their ACD or auto-attendant without stopping the dialer - which defeats the purpose of a dialer. So we use inbound blending lines. In many cases the inbound calls enters the phone system, and through the phone system's routing/acd/auto-attendant determined that the call needs to be sent to the dialer to be handled by the agent who is logged on. There are two ways we do this - 1) use analog station ports set up into a hunt group which are connected to analog ports on the dialer, once in the dialer the caller can be prompted for an account number and then routed to an agent or to a auto payment dialogue. 2) the inbound call is sent over a tie line to the dialer - this is where problems start. On the bigger PBXs the DS1 cards can be set up to be line-side cards and all is well, but on the majority of phone system my customers have (key/hybrids) the DS1 card is only a trunk card which often means DISA and CoS programing needs to take place in order to transfer a call from one T1 out a second T1 - something many phone techs don't know about or understand. How do I explain this to them so that they understand what I need?
I an ideal world I would have the phone system's ACD use DNIS or user entered touch-tones to send the call to the dialer over a T1 tie line and pass me some type of DNIS for routing to agent groups or payment dialogues.
Ask any questions you think will help you understand what I am asking and please tell me if you think I need a better way to explain the connectivity I need or are there better questions to ask the phone vendor about the capabilities of the systems I connect to.
Thanks much!
Dave
