Instruction manual

DEFINITY® Business Communications System and GuestWorks® Issue 6
Overview
555-231-208
Issue 1
April 2000
Hunt Group Solutions
12-2Automatic Call Distribution
12
The system provides an applications platform that consists of several elements.
When these elements are integrated to meet your business requirements, you will
have the advanced call distribution and management capabilities that will deliver
the performance and growth necessary for your business success.
NOTE:
Some applications and products are unavailable in some countries. Please
check with your local distributor for further information about which features
and applications are available to you.
Automatic Call Distribution
If your company has groups (such as reservations, sales, billing, or customer
service) that handle incoming calls, you can benefit by using the system’s
automatic call distribution (ACD) capabilities. ACD is the basic building block for
the hunt group applications.
ACD offers you a method for distributing incoming calls efficiently and equitably
among available agents. In an ACD environment, agents are assigned to splits
where all agents in that split typically handle the same types of calls. With ACD,
incoming calls can be directed to the first idle, most idle, or next idle agent within
the split to receive a call (circular hunting).
■ With first idle agent, incoming calls always start with the first agent in the
hunt group. If the first agent is busy, the call goes to the second agent.
When the first agent becomes idle, the next call goes back to that first
agent. This hunting scheme does not spread the calls evenly over all
agents.
■ With most idle agent distribution, an incoming call is routed to the agent
who has been available for the longest time, resulting in balanced
workloads for agents.
■ With circular hunting, the system keeps track of the last extension in the
split to which a call was connected, such that when the next incoming call
arrives, the system can determine the next idle agent in the circular hunt
group. Extensions in the hunt group that are busy are skipped, and the next
idle extension within the hunt group is selected regardless of past call
history. The caller could hear a busy tone if all extensions in the split are
busy and no type of call coverage has been designated.
DEFINITY BCS and GuestWorks supports a maximum of 150 logged-in agents,
with agents being part of up to four different splits. Each split has associated
trunks, stations, recordings, and queues. You can link a telephone number to an
ACD split by associating a published number (often an 800 or 888 toll-free num-
ber) with the split’s extension number.