What is the best way to set up direct to agent calling in Contact Center Enterprise?

Question

I have a need to route to agents from a menu choice or extension. We use an extension and a seperate agent login for our associates. I need to keep the call visible to Contact Center for reporting but it must route to the users Voicemail extension if the Agent is not available. There could be up to 20 of these in a sales unit that have to be setup. I am doing the first now and want to set it up the best way from the start. any suggestions?

Answer 1

There are a few ways to go about this.
Say, for example, that your agents have the following on their phone:
ACD line (no voicemail), same as Agent Peripheral ID
Personal line (with voicemail)
In my environment, we have a *XXXXXX pattern set up in CUCM which will go directly to the voicemail box of extension XXXXXX.
In my extension entry script, I use a Queue to Agent node with indirect agent reference. The caller inputs the Agent's ACD number, and if the Agent is available it delivers directly to them. You could of course continue queuing with messaging at this point, but in my case I follow up the Queue node with a Label that concatenates * to the number the caller entered. In Unity, I have configured the personal voicemail boxes with Alternate Extensions equal to the ACD line numbers.
Here's an example flow:
Caller enters ACD 801234 at prompt
Queue to Agent node queues to 801234
Agent not available, so Label node returns *801234
*801234 gets sent to CUCM (in my case through CVP). CUCM sends 801234 to Unity
Unity matches 801234 on Alternate Extension of 805678 personal line
Caller hears voicemail prompts for 805678
The important part of this design in my opinion is the direct-to-voicemail pattern (*XXXXXX in my example). You wouldn't want to overflow calls to a non-ACD number that actually rings the Agent's phone, as there is then the potential for calls with poor reporting. Getting to the right voicemail box can be done with Alternate Extensions as above, or you could keep a database table of AgentID-Extension matches and use the DB Lookup node in ICM.
-Jameson