How to Page an Operator at the Computer

Small businesses that have a Call Tree that answers the phones may want a feature that allows the caller to alert someone in the office that they need help. This can be accomplished by playing an announcement over the computer's speakers; if the operator is available, they can take the call.

Other situations may also call for alerting an operator: for example, if a caller calls in and keeps entering incorrect passwords to protected access area.

These situations can be handled by using Active Call Center's ACCAlerter COM object. The ACCAlerter object provides a variety of features for alerting someone in the vicinity of the computer that is hosting the Active Call Center Call Tree. The ACCAlerter object allows the user to specify a wave file to play over the speakers, text-to-speech text to be spoken over the speakers, and/or a beeping noise to get the attention of the operator.

Steps to Use the COM Object to Page the Operator

Step 1. Create the ACCAlerter.OperatorPager object.

Step 2. Decide which of the following attention getters to use: (a) play a wave file over the speakers, (b) use text-to-speech to speak text over the speakers, (c) make a beeping noise.

Step 3. Decide how long to wait for a response from the operator.

Step 4. Call the PageOperator function on the object, using the following parameters:

• LineID - a text value that defines the line number shown on the alert box. Use this value to help the operator know which line to answer.
• WaveFileName - the name of an optional wave file to play to the speakers.
• SpeakText - some optional text that will be spoken using text-to-speech. Text will be spoken in English only.
• WaitTime - the number of seconds to wait for an operator response.
• ConstantBeep - a True/False value that indicates whether the computer should make a constant beeping noise to attract attention (in addition to all of the other options).

Step 5. Check the result of the function: True indicates the call was answered by an operator, False indicates not.

Example

A complete example that demonstrates paging an operator can be found in the Page the Operator Example Call Tree in the Examples folder. The sample VBScript below shows use of the operator paging object:

' First step, define a variable for the outbound calling object.
Dim objAlerter, Result
' Now create the COM object to do the paging.
Set objAlerter = CreateObject("ACCAlerter.OperatorPager")
' Urgent request!
Result = _
objAlerter.PageOperator( _
"1", "", "Urgent! A caller needs help.", 30, True)
' Parameter "1": Line number shown to operator is 1.
' Parameter "": We won't use a wave file.
' Parameter "Urgent!...": Message to operator
' Parameter 30: Wait 30 seconds to respond.
' Parameter True: Make an annoying beeping sound to get attention.
' Check the result to inform the caller what's going on.
If Result = True Then
' You wouldn't really want this, just for demonstration here.
Speak1 = "The operator should have picked up the call by now."
Else
' Let the caller know no one was around.
Speak1 = "Sorry, no one is available to help you."
End If

Notes

The ACCAlerter object is just a simple COM object created using Visual Basic - another demonstration of the ease with which Active Call Center's capabilities can be extended.

ACCAlerter may not play/speak alert messages if multiple pages are going off at the exact same time.