Agents are able to receive call traffic from an Inbound or Outbound service they are not signed into while simultaneously participating in outbound campaigns on their service. This feature, Call Blending, is enabled through Service Groups (SGs). The service(s) contributing dial traffic to and receiving traffic from a service group are defined here. At a basic level, the service group defines which outbound services an agent can be signed into to receive traffic from the contributing inbound and outbound services. The major uses of the service group section include:
- Blending traffic from Inbound services to agents working Outbound campaigns
- Blending multiple outbound dialing service's traffic together with Call Priority as established on the service's Message
- Defining which services make up a Queue for queue-based transfers
The service group section is available by navigating to Configure > ACD > Service Group. From here you can see the list of existing service groups.
A second optional layer of routing specification, Agent Skills, further defines which specific agents, as well as their priority over other agents, receive traffic. See the Agent Skill section for more information.
The degree to which a service group uses the Agent Skill is defined by the service group’s “Type”. The following types are available:
- Longest_Available_Agent – If no agents with the proper skill are immediately available to take the call it will be transferred to the longest available agent in the same service group regardless of skill.
- Strict_Skill – If no agents with the proper skill are immediately available to take the call, the system will continue searching until a qualified agent becomes available or the service’s max hold time is reached. Hold time can be configured in the message. Once the maximum hold time is reached, the call will be terminated.
- Strict_Overflow – This algorithm allows clients to configure the amount of time to search for agents with the proper skill and a specific proficiency before expanding to include additional proficiencies. If no agents with the proper skill are available once all proficiencies are exhausted, the system will expand the target selection to include all agents in the service group and the call will be bridged to the longest available agent. If no agents are available, the system will continue searching until one becomes available.
- Uniform_Distribution - Clicker agents assigned to strict HCI or 10DMT services which are configured with this type of service group will be able to initiate calls on those configured strict HCI or 10DMT services.
