Selecting the Telephony Platform

The basic functions required of the telephony layer in a predictive dialing system are:

1. being able to accept requests to:
   • initiate a call
   • transfer a connected call to an agent
   • disconnect a call
2. notifying Softdial CallGem™ when a call that has been dialed:
   • is connected
   • has failed (and why)

Ideally these functions all need to be performed with a minimum of latency. Most switches and standards-based telephony services support these functions reasonably well. If they don't then you may have major problems.

There are some more subtle functions that the telephony layer must provide (in some fashion). These are:

1. support for third-party call control through whatever telephony services are used.
2. the ability to make outgoing calls on a trunk line without the call being associated with an agent station. The PBX may support this as basic functionality, or via a make predictive call mechanism, or it may require virtual or dummy stations to facilitate this.
3. the PBX must provide the ability for a third-party application to route a connected call to an agent through its telephony interface. This technique is known as adjunct routing. Generally, switches either provide support for adjunct routing, or the switch determines which agent the call should be routed to (switch determined routing). Softdial CallGem™ supports both kinds of routing. Softdial Telephony Gateway™ delivers adjunct routing.

Some readers may wonder why we haven't referred to call progress monitoring within this section. The reason for this is simply that this is an activity undertaken by telephony services (e.g. Dialogic cards in a server) or the switch, and it is only the results from such activity that are then passed to Softdial CallGem™.