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The Voice Telephony Settings page offers access to a variety of telephony settings specific to Active Call Center. There are three tabs: the General tab, the Outbound Calls tab, and the Answer Detection tab. Options available on each tab are discussed below.
General Tab
Adjust this setting to vary the number of rings before Active Call Center will answer an inbound call. Be warned that many devices fail if this setting is set to 1 ring or less. Use the up/down arrows to adjust this setting.
Enter the extension/number of a fax machine in this field. If your telephony hardware supports Blind Call Transfers, Active Call Center can auto-transfer fax calls to this dedicated fax line. Leaving the field blank or entering NONE will disable fax transfers.
This setting is a global timeout applied at every relevant Node in the Call Tree. If the user has not responded to a question within the specified time period, the software assumes that the user has left the call and disconnects the call. Use the up/down arrows to adjust this setting.
This setting determines the silence threshhold during audio recording functions. Higher levels mean that louder noise will qualify as silence: higher settings can be used when line conditions may be poor. Valid values are between 100 and 5000.
A user can press a touch tone digit to end a recording. During the recording process, the touch tone may also be recorded as part of the audio. This setting determines how much of the recording will be trimmed if a touch tone was detected. Acceptable values are between 10 and 750 (3/4 of a second).
Dialogic hardware supports playback of 11025 Hz 8 bit mono PCM audio more broadly than any other wave file format. Selecting this option will cause the sytem to record audio in this format so that it can be easily played back on Dialogic hardware. Selecting this option may cause recording to fail on voice modems and some telephony cards.
Active Call Center uses a standard error message to inform the user when calls end less than smoothly. The developer can modify the message to suit themselves: for example, "Please call back." The error message can also be a wave file: be sure to include the full path specification if providing the name of a wave file. Active Call Center Professional users should use a wave file for their error message.
Outbound Calls Tab
Most voice modems are not capable of determining when an outbound call has been answered. As a result, a Call Tree will often start immediately after dialing an outbound call - the phone may not even be ringing at the time the Call Tree starts! Active Call Center includes software based call answer detection that will adjust the start of the Call Tree to when it can make a determination that the phone has been answered. On calls where no answer is detected, the Answer_Phone field will show "No Answer Detected" in the Call History. Do not use this feature with telephony cards or modems that provide their own answer detection capabilities (for example, the Brooktrout telephony cards). Software based answer detection features may not work with all modems and telephone systems, so be sure to test the feature carefully. For more information, refer to the section on Using Software Based Answer Detection.
On an outbound call, the easiest way to determine the presence of a human is to request for feedback. The standard technique is to request a touch tone from the user: for example, the question at the Answer_Phone Node may read: "This is a survey from Active Call Center. Please press 1 to continue." The standard behavior is for Active Call Center to ask the question several times, waiting a few seconds between questions for a user to respond.
Our experience has been that answering machines and voice mail systems may hang up the line during the few seconds of silence while Active Call awaits a response. To combat this problem, select this option to shorten the silence intervals between waiting for a touch tone response at the Answer_Phone Node. In that way, even if an answering machine or voice mail system answers, the call can continue and the Call Tree can be designed to accommodate these situations. This feature only applies at the Answer_Phone Node for touch tone prompts.
Answer Detection Tab
The settings on the Answer Detection tab are only used if software based answer detection is selected on the Outbound Calls tab.
Different hardware devices deliver different qualities of audio. Furthermore, different applications may have different requirements in terms of false positive or false negative detection. The volume tolerance setting can be modified to increase or decrease the likelihood of an answer detect. Tweaking this setting will also optimize the behavior of Active Call Center with your particular hardware for answer detection.
Higher volume tolerances will require higher audio levels from the called party to detect an answer. Set this value too high, and dialed parties will literally have to scream "HELLO!" to generate an answer detect. Set this value too low, and line static and other noise may be accidentally detected as an answer.
Use the up/down arrows to adjust this setting.
After dialing a call, this setting determines how long Active Call Center will wait for an answer detect. If no answer is detected in the specified time interval, a "No Answer Detected" will be recorded for the Answer_Phone Node, the call data will be saved to the Call History, and the call will be terminated.
Use the up/down arrows to adjust this setting.
Service Settings Tab
This tab stores settings that apply when Active Call Center is run as a service under Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP.
This is the Call Tree that executes when the service is run.
This setting determines the Call Log database to which call data will be written.
Call History Tab
This tab stores settings that customize Active Call Center's use of the Call History database.
At the start of every call, Active Call Center writes a record to the Call History that marks the start of the call. The Call History database automatically assigns a Call ID number to the call for Active Call Center. For performance reasons, it may be advantageous to avoid using the Call History to generate Call ID numbers. In this case, disable this setting and Active Call Center will generate sequential Call ID numbers internally. Disabling this setting will automatically disable the other Call History options (which require a valid Call ID field from the Call History).
Note: internally generated Call ID numbers are guaranteed to be unique during a single monitoring session, but not necessarily unique across monitoring sessions).
The call history database can grow quite large if a lot of audio is stored into it. Many users save recorded audio in wave files and don't need an extra copy in the Call History. Un-checking this option improves performance of audio recording by not saving recorded audio in the Call History. Note: if audio is not saved in the call history, it should be saved with the SaveFileAfterRecord variable.
Some customers may record all relevant call information themselves using VBScript Macros. In these cases, they may find that Active Call Center's call data recording features are not needed. If this is the case, saving of call data into the Call History database can be disabled to improve performance. Disabling this setting is also recommended for high volume environments where the size of the Call History might be a concern.