Trunk Management
Historically, the number of trunks required for predictive dialing has been seen as a multiple of the number of agents, using a figure somewhere between two and three. This was always a crude approximation or an idea picked up from the days of unrestrained power dialing. In all cases, an efficient predictive dialer will never get anywhere close to these levels.
Nevertheless, even though the agent resources on an outbound campaign may be constant and the call outcome distribution stable, the number of trunks in use by Softdial CallGem™ at any one time is constantly changing, as agents' states change between talking, wrap and wait.
Measuring with precision with Oceanic®
The workforce and resource management product, Oceanic®, which is a companion product to Softdial CallGem™, allows trunk requirements to be measured with precision. It is recommended that all users of the Softdial CallGem™ acquire Oceanic®, not just for this purpose, but also for its ability generally to plan resources required on outbound campaigns. In particular, the Trunk Limit option in Oceanic® allows users to get an idea of what the impact on wait times is, when trunks are restricted.
Learning by doing
Another option is that users whose campaigns are reasonably constant in terms of agent numbers, call outcome distributions and so on may just elect to learn from the experience of running a campaign(s) for a few days, and using actual data. In practice most users will be pleasantly surprised at how few trunks they need using Softdial CallGem™, especially those brought up on the notion that you simply take the number of agents and multiply by two, or three.
The Trunks Open [TO] message
The Trunks Open [TO] message can be sent and resent at any time in a shift to allocate dialing resources to Softdial CallGem™. It applies to all campaigns. Until it is first sent, no dialing resources will be deemed to be available. Its function, as far as Softdial CallGem™ is concerned is to ensure that Softdial CallGem™ sends a Call Initiate [CI] message to the CTI layer only when it knows there are dialing resources available. The reason for this is to avoid a buildup of Call Initiate [CI] messages in the CTI layer, making agent and number management by Softdial CallGem™ inflexible, for example in responding to an Agent Unavailable [AU] message from the CRM application.
Call blending
At all times it will be down to the host to decide how many trunks Softdial CallGem™ has available to use. If all trunks made available to Softdial CallGem™ are in use by it, then this is a signal to the host to provide more, either in a trickle feed, or perhaps as a block. How this is done is very much wrapped up in the call blending options adopted by the host. If trunks are genuinely in short supply and the host needs to ration their allocation to Softdial CallGem™, then at some point, expect wait times between calls to rise.
If the CRM application wants to reduce all resources available to an outbound campaign, for example in response to an inbound spike, it should always release agents first, before the number of trunks available is reduced.
See also Changing Agent Status for the options available when the number of agents on a campaign changes in response to say call blending requirements.
Call progress ports
Oceanic® allows estimation of call progress ports as well as trunks.