Store Divert Project for 700ish stores 3

[ACooperman]

Hi guys,

I am not sure if this is the right forum but I need some advice.

We are currently undergoing a trial of diverting all call from our stores to Head Office.

As of current the trial is only 12 stores, the maximum number of calls we have recieved at any one time is 14 at peak.

We are using a CS1000 system with CC6 and CallPilot 600 for IVR (we dont use any of the messaging features on the CallPilot sytem we purely use it for IVR).

I am worried about the estimation of maximum calls that could hit us from adding the next 85 stores (the next stage of the trial). Mathmatically speaking that is a maximum of around 130 calls waiting at peak. There is also the possiblity of adding another 6 to 7 hundred stores.

We have other call centres running on the same incoming lines as the store divert project and currently we have 60 incoming lines for all of the call centres, generally the maximum used is around 30 including the store divert project.

Each store is diverted to a seperate DDI which is then named using DNIS so that the agent can answer with 'Hello store X how can I help?'

Does anyone have any experience with using 3rd party companies to handle overflow calls with busy messages?
Will a theoretical call maximum after all of the stores have been added of 840 calls at the same time with only approximately 140 agents to answer (at peak) we dont really want to take on 840 phone lines for the sake of 140 agents.

What is the maximum number of IVR ports it is possible to configure on a CallPilot 600 system?

How many IVR ports do you think we would need for that kind of call volume?

For this kind of call volume are we going to have to look at expanding the CS1000 in anyway? (Currently we have 3 digital cards and 1 analogue card (unused)).

There is potential for the trial after the next stage to be expanded to cover another 6 or 7 hundred stores. For this we will obviously have to look at changes to the phone switch. What are peoples recommendations for systems to use ?

I am sorry the information and questions are quite so vague I just want to know if anyone has any experience in similar projects, if so what kind of hurdels did you have to overcome and what issues arose from the project.

Thanks in advance for any help you may have.

Please do fire any questions you may have I will try to make my answers as comprehensive as possible.

Thanks again

Adam

 

[tnphoneman]

First thing is to make sure that you are running a dual processor system(HA) Then I would upgrade to a 1005 Callpilot for redundancy (RAID) and with these you should be able to handle thousands of calls no problem.

To answer your question I believe you can go to 96 channels but you don't want to do that then you have no way to make the recordings. 95 channels with the last one set for making the recordings.

You do realize that the access port recordings are done as broadcast right? More than one caller at a time can hear the same recording.

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[johnpoole]

with broadcast a single ivr port can answer and hold in que 32 trunks... so 32 times 96 would require a lot of pri's.. for just a call center, look at symposium.. i've set them up for customers with 10 times your est max.. 50 thousand calls per shift, 6 81c's spread across the world.. networked symposiums, paraphonies ivr, screen pops etc.. a call center can not outgrow the cs1000 platform.. you might look at a voip solution to save money in a few years, but for now i don't see a reason to make that change..

with symposium you can route on clid, or responce to ivr imputs to agents with unique skillsets.. your calls in que can alter your routing, if the oldest call in que is x seconds old, supervisors can be alerted via screen pops, email etc.. you've got way more options then you have problems at this point

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc

 

[trvlr1]

A good first step might be to get busy studies for all the lines you are going to bring to the central location. With this information you will be able to get a good idea of how many calls are likely to hit at any one time, and build out the hardware accordingly.

 

[ACooperman]

Please correct me if I am wrong,

So for the rollout to take the trial to 100 stores, we dont really need anything except a few more agents. (We have dual cpu's) In all my time in computing I have never heard of running a second CPU for redundancy :S its usually extra power.

Configure up some more ports on callpilot (Help Please!?!?!) Oh god it's sounds far too simple.

Anyone with any experience of 3rd parties hosting busy messages for when all of our lines are full ?

And is it possible to seperate some of our lines for other uses as such a technical maximum that the store divert can leave spare for our IT and Operational calls ?

Thanks for the help guys irnoob

Adam

 

[tnphoneman]

Normally all you would redirect is the main listed number so the others would be free to call inbound. You are redirecting at the carrier/LEC right? If you are talking about the PBX site for the spare lines then you will want 2 different trunk groups from the CO. One for normal operational uses and the other for all the inbound call center calls.

Call Pilot requires keycodes to allow you to configure more ports on the callpilot.

As far as the message when all lines are full that would have to come from the LEC as nobody else would know when your lines are full.

The thing that gets the server guys is RAID. They always want to configure RAID 5 and we Want RAID 1. They say this is a waste and old technology. My response is RAID 5 is easy for them to replace a hard drive and rebuild but I need the application to keep running without skipping a beat if a hard drive fails so I need RAID 1. File server RAID 5 ok but realtime call processing RAID 1.

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[ACooperman]

OK thank you muchly for your help.

More questions I am afraid, (this will teach you to have indepth knowledge)

The calls would be handled by a BT call director service which would take the customer call (they call an 01 or 02 number) and then route them through to a 3rd party.

This 3rd party would then handle our overflow calls and then pass the calls back to us over a VOIP trunk.

What is tha maximum queue that we can handle via a SIP trunk ?

Since we would not be using incoming lines for the calls are there any other switch limitations I need to look at ?

Can I setup an IDC table for the incoming SIP trunk so that I can name the numbers using DNIS in symposium for display on the agent phones (to maintain the transparency to the customer 'hello store x how can i help?').

Thanks again

Adam

PS fire me some server questions sometime as revenge

 

[ACooperman]

The reason I am question the number of calls we can queue through sip is that if we have the calls passed to us by SIP will we need an external queuing system or can we queue them all on our switch.

Thanks again

 

[tnphoneman]

The number depends on the number of SIP trunks and the ACD programming as to how many calls you can have in queue.

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[ACooperman]

ok lemme rephrase, How many sip trunks can we have and what is the maximum of an ACD queue or how can we change the maximum ?

thanks again.

 

[tnphoneman]

I am not looking at a book right now but I belive the QUEUE can go to 2047 calls waiting and I believe the number of trunks is between 500 and 600 per trunk route. I don't know the max of sip trunks per system off the top of my head.

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