IPCC Enterprise: Outbound calls priority over inbound calls

Question

How can I get outbound calls presented to the agents in SG-A even though there are calls queued to SG-A ?
My customer wish to service callbacks before queued calls.
To me it looks like the dialer doesn't issue the reservation call quick enough to get the agent reserved before the queueing mechanism is grabbing him.
Thanks
/Claus

Answer 1

The reason inbound calls take priority is because they are queued.
With personal callbacks, we try to reserve the agent even if it is currently busy so we have an opportunity to queue them.
With preview and predictive, we check the skill group once every 2 seconds and only attempt to reserve agents to see if there are available agents. So we won't attempt to reserve an agent if agents are busy with inbound calls. So if you have inbound calls queued up for a skill group that share the same agent pool as the outbound skill group, then those agents will likely be kept too busy with inbound calls. The Dialer won't try to make a reservation request if no agents are available and so there won't be an opportunity to add the calls to queue.
With Transfer to IVR campaigns, you can queue and route customer calls to agents. This would give you more flexibility, but there are some pros and cons.
PROS
You can make smart decisions in the routing script whether it is marked as Answering Machine or Live Voice.
You don't tie up an agent in reservation call waiting to find a customer.
You can prioritize the dialer calls over inbound calls in the scripting.
CONS
Customers will likely spend some time in queue, and may drop out.
The scripting to throttle calls is a little trickier.
The campaign reports and Dialer Detail records no longer tell you whether the call was handled by an agent or not. They stop tracking once the call is sent to the IVR. You only have the inbound call Termination Call Detail records and the inbound skill group and call type to track what happened ot the transfer to IVR calls.
David