Out Dial Call Escalation

[Harry L. Roberts]

I'm trying to use the OutDial_New.xml to perform call escalation.

 

What is happening is the first call is being made to a cell phone. What appears to happen is that my dialogic card is detecting the call was answered and then it reports that it was a Live person that answered.

 

I think the dialogic card is reporting this information before the call is actually answered by a live person or an answering machine. Is it possible something in the cellular system is triggering this prior to the actual call being answered?

 

Could the cell equipment be answering the call and then redirecting it to my cell phone?

 

That's what I think is happening.

 

This is my problem. Since VG thinks the call was answered by a live person no other calls are every attempted.

 

I've tried using the AnnounceMessage but it doesn't appear to work with dialogic. Is this correct? Does the AnnounceMessage only work with Voice Modems?

 

Ideally I need the program to require a live person to acknowledge receipt of my phone call. Ideally this would be after the message was delivered.

 

I could get by with the acknowledgement occuring at the beginning of the call but it would be much better at the end.

 

The problem with the acknowledgement at the beginning is that there maybe a problem with delivering the message after the acknowledgement has been made. Maybe the line is dropped or in the case of a cell phone call the phone may temporarly loose the connection and the message would never be delivered.

 

Any suggestions on how to accomplish my call escalation would be greatly appreciated.

[Harry L. Roberts]

Upon further review it now appears that I was wrong about the dialogic card reporting the answer prior to the actual answer.

 

What is happening is simply that the Dialogic card is reporting incorrectly that a live person answers when my cell phone voice mail answers.

 

Is there a way around this problem?

 

I've included 4 trace logs of the events.

 

1. Is with an Announce sound file specified and a live person answering.

2. Is with an Announce sound file specified and the cell phone Voice Mail answering.

3. Is with no Announce sound file specified and a live person answering.

4. Is with no Announce sound file specified and the cell phone Voice Mail answering.

 

It is my understanding that when no Announce sound file is specified that it uses the default sound file.

 

In each of the 4 instances above the Dialogic card has reported a live person answered.

 

In 2 of the cases that is fine but my problem is when the cell phone voicemail answers and is reported as a live person.

 

I know this appears to be a Dialogic problem but is there any way around it? If I could use the "Announce" with Dialogic it might solve my problem. I just need to be able to get 100% positive proof that a call is answered by a live person.

 

And as I mentioned before the ultimate solution would be to have 100% verfication of the message delivery after the message was delivered.

 

I guess I could write an entire script to perform what I would like but I'm not sure how I would start the script. I want this to work after each new message left in a voice mail box.

 

Can I run a VG script from the voice mail "Run" Command?

2006_02_17.zip

[SupportTeam]

What is happening is simply that the Dialogic card is reporting incorrectly that a live person answers when my cell phone voice mail answers.

We've seen this happen sometimes if the voicemail service is using high quality prompt replays.

Is there a way around this problem?

The only way is to have the system ask for the answering person to press a DTMF - that way you can confirm it's a real human.

 

Just modify our outgoing script to ask this question first, and if not the treat the call as an answering machine - ie: record till silence heard and then play the message to be left on the answering machine (if any).

Can I run a VG script from the voice mail "Run" Command?

No.

[Harry L. Roberts]

Support Said:

 

The only way is to have the system ask for the answering person to press a DTMF - that way you can confirm it's a real human.

 

I understand this part.

 

Just modify our outgoing script to ask this question first, and if not the treat the call as an answering machine - ie: record till silence heard and then play the message to be left on the answering machine (if any).

 

I don't completely understand this part.

 

When a live person answers I want to send them to vmMsgDeliver.vgs|VmDelivStart.

 

Is this the script I should modify?

 

Or should I have my "OnAnswer" be directed to a different script that plays "Please press any key to accept this call" and then have any key press take them to the vmMsgDeliver.vgs|VmDelivStart.

 

What I'm not real clear on is what happens if the Play module times out from lack of a key press. This would clearly indicate that the call was not answered by a live person but how do I make it treat this as the "OnAnswerMachine"?

 

In my case "OnAnswerMachine" will be set to "Retry" because I do not want to leave a message for an answering machine. So how do I handle this?

 

I don't understand how to have VG treat this as an answering machine and not count it as a completed call. I need it to count as a failed call and continue through the escalation.

 

Thanks for your help. With your help I think I'm getting very close to a solution.

[SupportTeam]

We've added some extensions into VG itself to make all this easier.

Download the just updated "VG for Dialogic" patch (v6.0.3055)

 

Then, to overwrite default forwarding behavior add this to VG.INI's [Voicemail] section:

 

VmForwardTel_AM_VMB0001=retry

VmForwardTel_AM=retry

 

VmForwardTel_AM_VMB0001 entry will result in "retry" being used as the setting in the 'Answering Machine' selection for forwarding of messages for mailbox 0001 only.

 

VmForwardTel_AM entry will result in "retry" being used as the setting in the 'Answering Machine' selection for all forwarding.

 

Instead of "retry" you can also specify another VGScript altogether.

 

Let us know how you go with this.

[Harry L. Roberts]

Download the just updated "VG for Dialogic" patch (v6.0.3055)

 

 

I tried to download the new VG for Dialogic patch and the file was corrupt.

 

The file I downloaded was only 196kb and would not open. I expected it to be over 2mb.

 

With this new version will there be an explaination of the new features?

 

Then, to overwrite default forwarding behavior add this to VG.INI's [Voicemail] section:

 

VmForwardTel_AM_VMB0001=retry

VmForwardTel_AM=retry

 

 

I'm not sure I understand this. I'm assuming that the above would apply to the voicemail "Forward Tel" . Is this assumption correct?

 

I'm also assuming that the above would still have problems if the Dialogic card does not correctly identify the answering machine or voicemail service.

 

My problem still requires escalation. Do these new features help with that?

 

If I use the OutDial_New.xml to add my numbers to the OutDial.mdb database is there anyway that I can indicate to VG that the call was answered by an answering machine? Are there any RV's that I can set that would indicate that the call was answered by an answering machine?

 

What I'm thinking of doing is having the call sent to a VG script that asks the person called to please press any digit to accept the call. If it is accepted I'll send them into the voicemail system with no problems. If the call is not accepted meaning that the call was answered by an answering machine or a voicemail system I would need to some how set an RV that VG would recognize as the call being answered by an AM or a voicemail system and then proceed through the escalation process.

 

It looks to me like the easiest way to handle this problem would be to allow VG to use the "AnnounceMessage" as an option with VG for Dialogic. This would give me the ability to require a key press from the caller to verify that a live person answered and not a voicemail system.

 

This should also be selectable on a case by case basis. In my case I might have 4 escalations. I might only want to use the "AnnounceMessage" and confirm by entering a digit with one of the numbers in my escalation list.

 

It could still basically work exactly like it currently does except that If a Dialogic user DID NOT want to use this feature they would enter "none" into the "AnnounceMessage" just as current modem users do.

 

This would seem to be a fairly simple fix. What are the chances of this being implemented?

 

I've really got 2 wishes.

 

1. Allow "AnnounceMessage" to work with Dialogic the same as it does for modems.

 

2. Have a "BeforeHangUp" node in the xml file that could be used for numerous things but in my case be used to have called party verify recipt of the message by entering a digit or digits. If they did not acknowledge receipt then VG would continue with the escalation just as if the call was not answered.

[SupportTeam]

We just tried downloading and v6.0.3055 downloaded fine...

 

The new settings will let you indicate what the system is to do when the answering machine is detected when delivering a voicemail message.

 

By default the voicemail delivery will act in the same way if a live person answers the call. This is because on many message deliveries to mobile phones the Dialogic card thinks that an answering machine answered the call when in fact a human answered and it was just a poor sound quality connection.

 

Using the new settings will let you specify a different script/action when the answering machine is detected.

My problem still requires escalation. Do these new features help with that?

No. If you want to use your own customized escalation then easiest way is to create your own script and use a "Send Phone Message" module within them.

1. Allow "AnnounceMessage" to work with Dialogic the same as it does for modems.

2. Have a "BeforeHangUp" node in the xml file that could be used for numerous things but in my case be used to have called party verify recipt of the message by entering a digit or digits. If they did not acknowledge receipt then VG would continue with the escalation just as if the call was not answered.

You could send an email to sales@voiceguide.com to get a quote on how much it would cost to get these features put in.

You're probably better off to load in the escalations yourself using the "Send Phone Message" module...

You will probably need a series of scripts to do this...