How to calculate Hold times in 3cx

[dommy575]

Morning all

Im just interested to know if there were specific reports which show how long agents have put customers on hold for? At present i cant find any report which is strange for a telephony system

Many thanks for the assistance

Dom

 

[VoIPTools]

I have searched high and low in the APIs, and through all the data 3CX collects, and I have concluded they do not record when a caller is placed on "hold".

My suggestion is that you train staff to use "park" rather than "hold". Every agent can have their own "park" BLF programmed on their phone that points to their personal "Park" location. If you have a large number of agents, you can configure 3CX to offer up to 999 parking locations. With these changes, there really is no procedural changes, it is simply swapping the hold button for the park BLF. Moving to park means you can get information about how long someone has been placed in "Park". And because each agent has their own park location, you can identify statistics on a per-agent basis.

 

[ybello]

Thanks for the brilliant suggestion. The next question that comes to mind then is - Can the Hold button/feature be disabled then? To force every agent to use the park feature instead?

I have experienced scenarios where, agents (dubiously) place customers on hold rather than terminate the call (since they are NOT allowed to end the call themselves). The customers stays on hold indefinitely and ends the call out of frustration (Bad customer experience).

So the idea of using the Park feature instead is perfect, the only thing is the hold feature is still available for use/misuse.

 

[VoIPTools]

I have a update on my idea, and the results are far from ideal.

My development team reported back that once a queue call is placed on park, 3CX no longer considers that parked call a queue call. This has the unfortunate side effect of messing with queue talk times

As an alternative, I looked into monitoring low-level SIP messages. I've always known that when a user places a call on hold there are some SIP SDP messages passed around that indicate a call has been placed on or removed from hold. While it is possible to monitor all the SIP messages between the PBX and endpoints, I'm not at all excited about the prospect of doing this. Further, in an environment where extension to extension calls are setup to not go through the PBX, monitoring for SDP messages becomes impractical. Perhaps this is why 3CX has never captured when a call is placed on hold?

One could argue that inbound queue calls typically are external calls and therefore always go through the PBX, and could be monitored, but not all queue calls are external. It is not uncommon for large organizations to have internal queues for assisting internal employees. I suppose if you forced all calls to go through the PBX, then monitoring SDP messages from the 3CX server would be possible... I guess you have to decide how bad you want the information. It's not going to be easy and it is going to have some stipulations on your 3CX setup.