Time Zone Pre-Processing
As well as being able to manage the timing of calls based on lower and upper time bounds (for more details, see Time Zone Management settings), Softdial Campaign Manager™ has the capability to generate this time bound data, during the pre-processing of a campaign.
For details of how this is used by Softdial Campaign Manager™ to define valid times for calling records based on the called party's time zone and local legislation, see Pre-Processing a Campaign.
If a contact already has call time bounds, then these will not be recalculated, even if the data files are changed. To recalculate all time bounds, the time bound columns must be purged. For information on how to do this, see Time Zone Management.
Softdial Campaign Manager™ generates the time bound data (in UTC) based on the following information:
- A data file that maps state/ country code to time bounds in that time zone (needs to exist on the server - see Timezone Data Import)
- A data file containing postcode, telephone area code, state/ country code, time zone and Daylight Savings (needs to exist on the server - see Timezone Data Import)
- The postcode of each contact (if the data exists and the column was specified in the configuration)
- The telephone area code of each contact (if the data exists and the number of digits was greater than zero in the configuration)
- The state/ country code of each contact (if the data exists and the column was specified in the configuration)
- The time zone and Daylight Savings state of the server computer
For each contact in the campaign database, the action flow during pre-processing is similar to Fig. 1:
Fig. 1 - Time Zone Pre-Processing Flow Chart
After the pre-processing task is completed, the Server Notification Panel displays a count of
- the number of contacts which were time zone pre-processed, and
- the number that could not be cross-referenced (and so will not be called)