Queue transfer = Abandond Call

[GBC_James]

Hi
We have gone live this week with 3CX v15.15 and on the whole it's working great.

One teething problem we have discovered is that one of our call queues has an option for the customer to use an automated payment service. So they "Press 1" and their call is transferred to the auto-payment line with is an external number (as it's a service provided by a third party company)
this works ok, but the our CRM Manager is complaining that her stats are showing a high number of abandoned calls.
I have worked out that all calls that are transferred to this auto-payment line are being marked as abandoned calls.
Having looked at a few other threads it seems this has been a problem others have experienced for a while.

From a stats point of view the call is not abandoned at all, it's doing exactly what it should be doing.

Is there any way at all to stop these calls being flagged as abandoned? It's a bit embarrassing for us as he IT department as we have give everyone a shiny new phone system and immediately one of our customers has spotted quite a basic problem that is making them look bad.

any help much appreciated.

James

 

[StefanW]

Hey and great to see you up and running.

Reg. your question, I dont understand the flow, as in a Queue you can not press a button to be transferred. an IVR would do this. Can you list all services in the flow

[Incoming Call] - [Hop] - [Hop] - [Payment Service]

 

[GBC_James]

Hey and great to see you up and running.

Reg. your question, I dont understand the flow, as in a Queue you can not press a button to be transferred. an IVR would do this. Can you list all services in the flow

[Incoming Call] - [Hop] - [Hop] - [Payment Service]

Hi
Sorry for the delay,

I used call flow designer, which is great by the way.

So a call comes to our main number and they are given options.
The first option is to press 1 to make a payment.
Having pressed 1, they are then given 2 more options. Press 1 to use the automated payment line, or press 2 to speak to customer service advisor.
If they press 2, they wait in the queue until an agent takes the call. This works perfectly.
However the problem is if they press 1. This then transfers them to the auto payment line, which dials an 0800 number to a third party service. This transfer is logged as an abandoned call, which it isn't because the customer goes on to make their payment perfectly.
But looking on the Q-manager screen (Switchboard) it definitely shows an abandoned call whenever a customer chooses this option.

So I created a test queue with fake agents. I gave the call flow 2 options, Press 1 to go into the actual queue and wait for an agent to pick up, and Press 2 to be transferred directly to my extension.
Again the same thing happens, pressing 1 to wait for an agent, no abandoned call. But pressing 2 to be transferred directly to my extension results in an abandoned call being logged.

 

[lneblett]

My take is this, and possibly not correct-
A call comes into the Q and if, for any reason, an agent within the Q is not able to service the call - hang-up, opt-out, no answer, etc. - it is considered as an abandoned call. Once you gave the caller the opt-out for the payment service, it left the Q and was considered abandoned. The purpose of a Q is to balance the incoming call volume against the number of available agents so as to answer as many calls as possible before a Q time out or other aspect comes into play that prevents an agent from answering. If they leave the Q without being serviced, it is considered abandoned. It is a strict Q.

Presumably, you could/might be able to direct the call flow to an IVR first and let the caller select the path so that only those that want the Q option get into it, whereas the others go to the payment system without hitting the Q at all.

Having said all of the above, the one aspect that I wonder about is if a Q allows the callback option, and the caller's place is maintained and the callback succeeds, is if this should be counted as an abandoned call? Currently, I believe it is and this one puzzles me as to why?

 

[GBC_James]

Thanks for the reply

I have resolved the issue this way, using a combination of queues and IVR. Whether this is the correct way or not I don't know but I think it solves our problem.

Here's what I have done, sorry if it's confusing.....

Call comes in to a dummy Queue with no agents. This Queue has the DDI inbound rule, so I can give it specific office hours.

I upload a voice app created by CFD. This basic app says "Out of hours direct to an out of hours message, In hours (some very specific) direct to an IVR". The reason I did this is because the queue need to have the specific office hours the work for internal calls as well as external. the DDI hours only apply to external calls coming in.

The IVR then can send calls to external numbers, individual extensions etc without recording an abandoned call. YAY! (keeps our internal audit dept happy)

The IVR also sends calls to our real, live queues with agents logged in.
As there are no more options at this point, the call ether gets answered by an agent or the call is genuinely abandoned in the sense that the caller actually hangs up, the figure for abandoned calls is accurate.

We had to do it this way because of our users. While each queue has its own DDI, some of our users receive direct calls which then have to be forwarded on to the correct team, and therefore in to their queue. This is an internal call to the queues internal extension number, and because some of our queues have odd open hours we needed the Office Hours redirects to work.
Otherwise an external call direct to the queue would hear the out of hours message, but an internal call would still try to send the caller in to the queue and they would get a "no agents available" message or similar.

Hope this makes sense. It seems to be working for us