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Accurately determining the presence of a live person on an outbound call is a challenging task. To most computerized devices, an answering machine and a human are virtually indistinguishable.
Some telephony card users may find that they have hardware settings that allow filtering of calls answered by answering machines. Users that have these types of devices should refer to their manufacturer's documentation for information about handling answering machines. At this time, Active Call Center cannot use this feature with hardware that provides on-board answering machine detection.
Most users will find they do not have any automatic means of distinguishing humans and answering machines. Active Call Center's software based answer detection cannot make this distinction, and we are not aware of any voice modems that can reliably make such a distinction in hardware.
Distinguishing Live People from Answering Machines
The key to making an answering machine/live person distinction is to focus on one characteristic that differentiates the two from Active Call Center's point of view: the answering machine cannot interact with the call. Therefore, the best means of making the distinction is to pose a question and wait for feedback. If there is no feedback, the Call Tree can assume that an answering machine is present.
In order to be able to process no response from the user, the Allow the Call to Continue Even if No Response is Given option must be selected. Refer to the Outbound Call Survey example Call Tree for an example: at the Answer_Phone Node the prompt "This is an automated survey. Press 1 to continue." is repeated many times. In the macro, the "No Response" option is processed by speaking a brief message which will hopefully be picked up by an answering machine if one is recording.
Note: The initial prompt in the Outbound Call Survey is repeated many times because the Call Tree is not designed to use software based answer detection. With this Call Tree, it's likely that the answering machine would record the prompt repeating many times as part of the message. To adjust the Outbound Call Survey to not repeat the prompt so much, edit the prompts at the Answer_Phone Node so that they do not repeat many times.
Avoiding Silence Time-out Hangups
Most answering machines automatically terminate a call after a predetermined length of silence. As a result, it's possible that the delay between prompts while Active Call Center waits for a response will be long enough to generate a silence timeout hangup from the answering machine.
To address this issue, Active Call Center allows touch tone prompts at the Answer_Phone Node to be speeded up during outbound calls to avoid silence timeout hangups from answering machines. For more information on this setting, refer to the section on Voice Telephony Settings.
To decrease the silence interval between touch tone prompts at the Answer_Phone Node:
From the menu bar, select Tools ... Voice Telephony Settings. A dialog will appear.
Click on the Outbound Calls tab.
Check the box marked Shorten response time for Answer_Phone touch tone prompt.
Click Accept Settings to close the dialog.
This setting applies only to touch tone prompts at the Answer_Phone Node and only during outbound calls.
Identifying Answering Machines in the Call History
If the above techniques have been applied to distinguish answering machines, the Call History should show a "No Response" for the value of the Answer_Phone Node. For easier identification, the "No Response" calls could also be filed in a specific folder for faster retrieval. Refer to the section on the Folder variable for more information on its use.