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Managing transfers occurring in outbound calls

Questions and answers about Plum Fuse development

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wrothman@dealermagic.net
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Managing transfers occurring in outbound calls

Post by wrothman@dealermagic.net »

In an outbound call, how do I graphically represent a call that is answered by a person, who, as a result of the voice message spoken, has to transfer the call to another person. And what if the transfer is to a voice mail?
DMIVS

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IVR transfers using SynApps

Post by support »

Hi Wayne,

As mentioned in a previous post, we are still in the process of creating a tool to place IVR outbound calls using an application. As you may have noticed, the outbound feature is currently unavailable on the front page of SynApps.

About your questions, you could use the Transfer module for transferring calls to another person. If the transfer hits a voicemail message, it will go to a voicemail and counts as an "answered" call (as opposed to being a "noanswer").

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Plum Support

wrothman@dealermagic.net
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Outbound

Post by wrothman@dealermagic.net »

In the absence of the outbound tool, how can I deploy the apps that I am almost done creating? Does this tool generate code that simply needs some human programming to button down? I'm loving it so far. Going to have one of our folks test all of the links for the four apps beginning this afternoon. That only leaves us web services integration and the aforementioned inability to place a call. I'm certain to have more questions.
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outbound for your SynApps IVR application

Post by support »

Hi Wayne,

While outbound is still being integrated into SynApps, there is still a way for you to make outbound calls of the IVR applications that you have created.

First, you will need to assign your application to a phone number. To do this, first go to your My Apps page (this is the first page that comes up by default when you log in). From there, place your mouse over one of your applications and click on "assign #". Click on the gray box for one of your phone numbers until it is checked and states "will be assigned this app rev __".

Next, log into your hosting account by either going to our homepage and entering your login information for Hosting (should be the same information that you are using to log into SynApps) or by going to our hosting page and entering your login information there.

From there, go to Applications->Application Configuration. There, you will see an application URL tied to the application that you assigned to that phone number (http://synappsbeta.plumvoice.com...). Please keep track of this URL as this will be the start_url that you assign for your outbound call.

Next, go to Developer Tools->Outbound Calling. On that page, please take note of the "Login" and "Outbound PIN". You will need this information for generating an outbound call.

The final step is to go to our Plum Web Services API Examples page. There, you can enter your Login, PIN, Phone Number (phone number that will be called), and Start URL. Once you've entered your information, click on "Queue Call" and you should be all set.

For more information on outbound, please see here.
For creating outbound call campaigns, please see here.

Regards,
Plum Support

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Re: Managing transfers occurring in outbound calls

Post by support »

Hi Wayne,

We've now put the outbound tool into our private beta. It should be easy to find (at the top when you log in.) It operates entirely on Simple Database tables.

Our next step is to complete the API for that; we will release information on that shortly.

Try it out, and tell us how it goes!

SynApps Team

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Re: Managing transfers occurring in outbound calls

Post by wrothman@dealermagic.net »

I tried a limited campaign, which was very easy to do. In one case, it captured the appropriate answers and showed "success, 1 attempt". In the second case, there was no success in that the fax number was not acquired as the call went into voice mail. Note, this raises some issues. How does the application discern a voice mail versus a person? We've set the application to leave a message, though, admittedly, we did not know how that would work. That need is now here. Will we be able to tell when a message is left?

Very slick.
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Re: Managing transfers occurring in outbound calls

Post by support »

Hi Wayne,

Our platform offers callee_type detection. This determines whether the application was answered by either a human or an answering machine. You can view this post concerning more information about callee_type detection: http://support.plumvoice.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1442. We have forwarded this feature request to the developers about adding this into SynApps similarly to the ANI or DNIS.

Regards,
Plum Support

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Re: Managing transfers occurring in outbound calls

Post by support »

Allow us to add a few thoughts onto that last post:

While we do have callee_type detection on our platform and are considering adding it to SynApps, it is not 100% accurate, which may not be reliable enough for your project. There are also some downsides in that it creates an indeterminate pause at the beginning of a call while it "listens" to whatever picks up the phone.

A more durable solution is to ask the caller to press 1 or some other DTMF signal so that you are sure that you have a human on the line and they understand what is going on. You can even integrate this with retry logic; while editing your app, check out the new modules in the Outbound Campaign category.

A typical app that uses this format would be:

Start --> Retry this Call? : Do retry this call --> Yes/No "This is an automated call from X, do you want to continue?"

If 1 is pressed --> Retry this Call? : Don't retry this call --> possibly, Update Call Row with other data you subsequently collect

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