This manual is out of date and not matching current layout and many functions of the latest version. This website has been. OSDial Basic Operations Manual The Open Source Dialer Copyright © 2009 Call Center Service Group, LC. Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. If you are running the LiveCD's, you will need to boot the server CD first. When prompted, enter your company name. If you don't enter it, it will automatically go to the default. If you have a promotional VoIP login, you can enter that at this screen. This will give you a temporary VoIP account for testing. Otherwise, you will need to provide your own VoIP account. When it is finished booting, you will see this screen telling you the IP address of the server and the various login information that you will need to log in, agent and administrator. With the server up, boot the agent CD. As you can see above, it will default to User 1000 and Extension 1000. If you are running more than one Agent CD, then you will have to press the Enter key when prompted at this screen: and type in the next sequential Agent and Phone Extension numbers on this screen: Please note that the LiveCD's are not capable of handling more than a few agents. To log in as an administrator, you point your browser — which should be Firefox — to the web server. If you are using a single-server dialer, it will be the IP of that machine. Otherwise, it will be the dedicated web server. Enter the login and you will be at the administrator screen. If this is the first time, you may need to set up the agents and the phones. We will start with the agents. It will give you a list of available agent accounts. If you got the free download CD, then you will find ten agents and one admin already configured. Access Levels 1 through 7 are for agents, while 8 and 9 are for administrators. If you have the free CD's, the connection to the VoIP carrier will be using IAX. IAX was developed by the Asterisk developers and has certain advantages over SIP. SIP, on the other hand, is the industry standard, and is commonly recognized by various programs. We use IAX because it makes the connection to the temporary VoIP account work without any additional changes. If you are configuring it yourself, you will have the choice of SIP, IAX, or a traditional PRI. Some leads are needed to make test calls to. When picking a test number, it is advisable to use your own phone numbers, such as cell phones or office numbers. There are two options of how to enter in these numbers. The shorter route will be to use the upcoming feature of OSDial to generate test numbers. The other route is to generate a. Before we can import the leads, we need a List to import it to. Enter a new List ID and Name and Description. If you are importing real leads: If you know how to create a. If the file layout is correct then it will go straight in. If on the other hand you are only creating test leads using one number then we should not check for duplicates. Click on Submit, and the Custom File Selector brings up a new screen. Here we assign each field in the file to a list field. Obviously we must have a 1 for phone code country code and a phone number. Postal Code is also a good idea whenever possible. These are the minimum fields you need to have: If you choose a plain text file to import from it MUST end with. A csv file MUST end with. Once you have dialed all the numbers in a list, you need to reset it before going through it again. As seen here: Remember, almost all calculations are done at each full minute, so your changes will not take effect until the next minute. It is also normal to take a few seconds after the full minute before your changes show up. A test campaign has already been created for you. Notice there is a question mark on the end of each field, which will give you help regarding what goes in each field. As you dial the numbers, there are going to be different result from each call. Some will be busy, no answer, answering machine, etc. These are set automatically by the dialer, or by each agent as they terminate each call. The latter means the dialer did not pass the call to an agent. Line thirteen tells you the sequence that the dialer will work its way through the list. The Hopper is analogous with the rotating cage at a bingo game, from which each number is pulled. Once every minute, the Hopper checks to see if it is low on leads — meaning, below the currently set Hopper Level. If so, it repopulates itself with the number of leads the Hopper Level is set to. The correct Hopper Level is approximately the number of leads that you use in a couple of minutes. Setting it too high will result in callbacks not being made on time, perhaps not even on the correct day. The rate by which you go through leads can be observed from the Real Time Detail Screen. Every change will require either pressing Enter inside a field or clicking on Submit. There are nine fields that have a light green background. These fields are what you would use on a daily basis to tune the dialer as you go. There are three dial methods: The first one is Manual Dial, which means that the dialer will only dial a number when the agent tells it to. This is useful when you need to spend time reviewing each lead before dialing it, such as insurance sales to existing clients, where the information for each client can be substantial and be too much to read while talking with the client. The next dial method is Ratio. In this, you set the ratio of calls being made per available agent. The Dial Level is fine-tunable from 1. Dial Ratio is primarily used when you have approximately less than seven available agents. Ratio requires constant monitoring and adjusting for optimum dialing. Finally, we have Adaptive Dial. Here, the dialer automatically computes how many calls it needs to make in order to keep the available agents active all the time. This is of course not entirely attainable. If the wait time for each agent is too low, some calls will not be answered as every agent will already be in a call. There are laws concerning how many dropped calls you can have in thirty days. On the other hand, if you slow down the dialer too much, the agents will be waiting for a long time and not be effectively utilized. Ideally, the dialer is running at the dial level where you have minimum wait time and and no dropped calls. The Adaptive Dial mode does this for you by continuously monitoring and adjusting the dial level. Generally speaking, you don't want to change anything until you are clear with what it does. Most settings are set for the best performance. This excludes agents that are paused or in a call. This is useful when your agents spend long times on each call and including them in the computation would upset the dial logic and make it not run effectively. Check with your attorney but, as laymen, we don't see which 30 days the law specifies. Could be the last 30, or any 30. Or maybe it means a calendar month. You get the number by taking the total number of lines you have, and dividing it by the number of agents on the dialer. Being aggressive means that it will add more calls than the dialer would have made otherwise. This is usually never used. This is handy for avoiding dropped calls — you can assign a number of agents that will always be waiting for any sudden increase in answers. Likewise, you can set how many calls will be waiting for agents, though this is normally not what you want. This sets how many calls are transfered to agents at the same time. If you are using PRI or VoIP, you can set this per campaign. Otherwise, your phone carrier will ignore what you set here and enter the number they have on file for you. Usually they are kept out of the inactive campaign. If you are running in Adaptive mode and only a few agents go active at the same time when you start a campaign, you are more likely to start with a high drop percent. Any dropped call can easily result in a 100% drop rate. By having all agents start at the same time you lower the chance of this occurring. Currently available lists for this campaign can be seen at the bottom of the page. A list with real-time campaign details indicating the current status for each campaign is displayed. The screen will update every four seconds. This screen gives you the ability to create an unlimited amount of additional information forms for use by the agents. To recap, you make sure you have agents and phones configured, an active list with leads, and a campaign to use them in. And then you are ready to go. This will bring you back to the welcome screen. Before you can dial, you need an agent to log in from the welcome screen. If you are running the LiveCD's, your phone login is 1000, password 1000, and agent login is 1000 with a password 1000. Select that and click submit. If you have an active phone, it will now ring. You will be told that you are the only one in the conference. When a call comes in it will be passed into one of the rooms. Also, there should be a Mute button between the Hot Keys and Volume buttons on the bottom right of your Agent screen. If this button does not show up but your phone does ring, you need to contact your administrator. Go ahead and click on mute. This will give you time to review the information before dialing. Otherwise, you will not see this line. If a script has been assigned to the campaign, the Script window will automatically be selected. You can switch back and forth between the data entry form and the script by clicking on the tabs at the top of the screen. The program displays the duration of your call, as well as the customer's local time, just above the script window. The call duration will be visible even when you switch to the data entry screen, and after the call is terminated, and stay there until the next call is started. If you click on it, it will show you a selection list for choosing which form you want to have loaded. This is set in each campaign. You may, for example, want to have a credit card form for all campaigns and some specific forms only for selected campaigns. All information entered on these additional information forms can be used in scripts. D1 and D2, on the bottom right, can be configured to dial, f. If you hover the mouse over the Hot Keys button, the Hot Keys disposition menu will come up, allowing you to set the disposition for the call with a single key press. When the call is terminated, the disposition screen will automatically come up, where you will need to select a disposition. You can also set the disposition here by clicking twice on the one that applies. Each agent is working in a session. And each session has a unique id. To keep clutter down and avoid confusing the agent with unnecessary information, the session id is hidden. This Session ID number is used during troubleshooting to identify which session the agent is in.