Call center example (campaign): starting a call

The Accolades interface for agents is quite flexible and allows for performing several tasks, according to the specific demands for the current call.

The following steps are just an example that can be applied in most cases. But keep in mind that there will be situations where the agent has to perform additional tasks, depending on the call nature. For a high efficiency, the agent has to be familiar with the entire Accolades interface, for the Call center agents.

The example assumes that the agent already has the Accolades Agent interface opened, from the Call Center module, the Agent option. Also, the agent needs to have a phone device attached to his account (if not, then Accolades will ask for this step to be competed, before accessing the Agent interface).

An agent can start a call to an available contact from a campaign straight from the interface, with no need to dial the phone number. First the agent will select an available contact and then he will start the call. The following steps need to be followed, to achieve that:

• The agent asks for an available contact, from the server, by pressing the Search contact button, placed right to the campaign name (the button is displayed only for the campaigns that have available contacts);
• If no contacts are available, Accolades will display a message indicating this and the procedure will end;
• If the server found an available contact, Accolades will display info about the contact in the Select contact tab;
• The agent can view info about the contact, as they are defined inside the campaign, in the INFO section (name of the campaign, phone number and remarks about the contact);
• Accolades will also search the phone number from the campaign in the customer database for the account and if a customer is found the interface will display info about the customer (identity info, call history);
• The agent can request another contact from the server by using the Previous and Next buttons;
• If the displayed info is OK then the agent can start the call to the contact, by pressing the Call button (the agent phone will start ringing and after it is answered the server will automatically dial the contact phone number);
• After the agent has picked up the phone, the interface will change to the editing mode, to allow the agent to fill in all the info about the call in progress.

Keep in mind that a displayed contact is reserved to the agent viewing the info. That means that, when an agent requests a contact, the server will search the available contacts, excluding the ones that are being viewed by other agents (it is not possible for two different agents to view the same contact, at the same time). Because of this, a contact from a campaign is displayed to an agent for only 2 minutes, while the contact is being excluded from searches. After 2 minutes, the contact will become available once again and it will disappear from the agent interface.

The call to a contact has to be initiated within the 2 minutes interval, started when the contact has been requested from the server.