Messages

1

Improving QueueMetrics / Re: Let Realtime display a friendly log-in extension

« on: April 08, 2013, 20:19:12 »

XMPP would be impractical because of the need for agents to login separately to an instant messaging system, and because the main program they run while answering calls is a full-screen desktop app. 

To reword my idea: On the picture of a real-time status panel (on pg 83 of your v30 user manual), the section called "Agents currently logged in" has a column called "Extension".  Currently, it shows the Asterisk SIP line ID the agent is using to answer queue calls.  Since the SIP IDs we use on our system are alphanumeric and generally look cryptic to the the untrained eye, it's impossible for a viewing supervisor to know the location of agent to pay him a visit or call him on another line on his phone.  My proposal would be to display a human-readable entry in the Extension column coming from a look-up table in the Q-M database.

-  Dennis

2

Improving QueueMetrics / Let Realtime display a friendly log-in extension

« on: April 07, 2013, 01:15:53 »

In my A* installation, all SIP lines have alphanumeric IDs.  For a set of phones with lines dedicated to answering a queue, if the extension reserved for the queue is 290, then the SIP IDs would be sip/a290a, sip/a290b, sip/a290c, etc.  When an agent logs into a queue, the Q-Met Realtime page shows this SIP ID for the extension, as A* enters it in the queue_log file. 

The problem is that most of our agents can rove, and the SIP ID gives no clue as to where the phone is located or any of the phone's other extensions, so the manager viewing the realtime page doesn't know how to contact an agent.  My idea for improving Q-Met is to display a "friendly" name in lieu of a raw SIP ID as the agent's extension.  This is a parallel to the feature you already have for friendly agent names.   

Sound good?

-  Dennis

3

Running QueueMetrics / Re: Adjusting Agent Options when adding/removing member and pausing/unpausing

« on: April 05, 2013, 08:41:15 »

In my A* installation, all agents are allowed to roam, all the phones are multi-line, and all the SIP channels are a mixture of letters and numbers.  When an agent wants to add himself as a queue member using Q-M, the only "extension" he knows about for a phone is a 3-digit number that appears at the top of the phone's display.  So I have to convert that known extension to a corresponding SIP line ID.   Q-M has no facility to make this conversion, so I'm forced to use A*. 

For the A* conversion, I've created a separate MySQL database, with a dedicated table containing columns for the known extensions and the SIP line IDs.   Then I modified the logic for extension 35 in dialplan context [queuemetrics] to let A* make an ODBC function call that determines a replacement value for var ${QM_AGENT_LOGEXT} before calling AddQueueMember.  No changes were required to the extensions for removing, pausing or unpausing the agent. 

In the case where the agent has entered an invalid extension when joining, the ODBC function returns a blank, and I make the var ${QUEUENAME} blank so as to force the AddQueueMember call to fail.  Then no entry to the queue log is generated, and the Q-M realtime display shows no change in membership.   

I hope this info is useful to anyone struggling with the problem of agents logging in with invalid extensions. 

-  Dennis