This chapter covers the following topics:
There are two areas of consideration when planning an Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony implementation. The first area includes collecting the information you need to implement the application. The second area involves system configuration planning (size, speed, number, etc.).
The planning process involves:
Use the following list of questions to determine your implementation needs:
What type of Outbound Application will you be using? Oracle TeleSales? Oracle Advanced Collections?
What dialing strategy will you be using? Manual? Progressive? Preview? Timed Preview?
Depending on your dialing method, you may need to confirm the best way to handle the processing of the list. How many agents will be handling the campaign activity? If there are a few, you might want to run a progressive campaign.
What is your PBX Name? PBX type? PBX server?
What Computer Telephony Integration will you be using? (Server, type, configuration, etc.).
What are your agent extension numbers?
What will your outbound call volume be (calls/hr., average, low and peak usage)?
Do you have any special calling requirements and restrictions (restrictions on number of calls, call time, etc.)?
Any Federal, State and local laws and/or regulations that govern telemarketing, such as the callable hours during the weekdays, weekends and holidays.
What will you be using for your test agent information?
What will you be using for your test data?
What validation information will you be using?
Area Code/Time Zone Mapping Data
How do you want to handle call outcome and recycle handling information?
Do you want to emphasize initial call attempts or emphasize persistent callbacks?
How do you want to handle wrong numbers and other special cases?
For every campaign activity, you need to create recycling strategies that best correspond with the needs of the business. How do you plan to handle a record that is returned after it has been dialed for a non-connect? Do you really need to reach the client, or can the call wait a day?
What Dialing Access Information will you need?
T1, E1 line control mode (Onhook/Offhook)
External line access (dial 9)
Local calls (same area code, different area code)
Long distance access code (same area code, different area code)
International access code
Area code information
Special dialing information for PBX (always dial all digits, etc.)
What are the sources of records to be dialed?
Existing customer data?
Imported prospect data?
Legacy systems?
Note: While there may be one or many original sources of business data, in Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony, all data come from Oracle Marketing and is thereby part of the Oracle TCA customer model.
Setup planning involves matching your business requirements to the software and hardware components necessary to best satisfy those requirements. The list of questions in this topic will aid you in determining your hardware requirements, and the sizing parameters for the Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony servers.
Use the following list of questions to help determine your system configuration:
What type of switch will you be using?
What type of telephone sets will your agents be using?
What middleware will you be using?
What are the extension numbers for the dialers?
What are your agent extension numbers?
Note: Compatibility between Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony and third party products, including Computer-Telephony Integration middleware and switches, is certified after testing with each release of these Oracle products. Each combination of a switch, the switch vendor's own software release, and each CTI middleware release, must be certified independently. While Cisco ICM and Dialogic CT-Connect are the two middleware products currently supported by Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony, there are limitations on the certified combinations of phone switches, switch software, and CTI middleware with each version of these Oracle products.
Note: The certification information changes with some frequency, as third parties add and drop products and versions, and as Oracle's certification process proceeds. Therefore, current certification information is maintained on a web site, accessible to Oracle sales and product development personnel and to Oracle partners.
Note: Customers should always have their Oracle sales channel verify, from the web site, that the combination of phone switch, switch vendor software and version, switch configuration, CTI middleware software and version are compatible and supported, prior to making an implementation plan.
Use the following list of questions to help determine your sizing needs:
How big will your call center be? How many agents will you have?
What call volume are you expecting in your call center?
Will your call center be single site or multi site?
The Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony Dial Server is moderately memory intensive, however, it is heavily network intensive due to its communications with the UWQ agent and UWQ server, as well as the database.
The following table provides sizing recommendations for the Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony Dial Server:
| # Agents | Minimum Memory | Maximum Memory | Thread Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 - 100 | 128 Megs | 256 Megs | 300 |
| 101 - 250 | 256 Megs | 512 Megs | 500 |
| 251 - 500 | 512 Megs | 1024 Megs | 1000 |
The number of trunks is dependent upon call volume, call center size, and so on. Each agent must have 1 channel to go out and 1 channel for the dialer. Oracle recommends a 1 to 1 trunk to agent ratio in cases of high voice rate (when we expect a high percentage of dials to result in a live voice). However, if the voice rate is low (say 30%) or when live agents are expected to leave answering machine messages, a higher dialer-to-agent ratio is acceptable. This ratio should not be 2 to 1.
How many dial servers will you need?
To what server group will each dial server belong?
How do you want to set up your PBX, and Agent distributions?
What dialing scripts will you use?
The Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony Central Server is not memory or server intensive, however, it does rely heavily upon the database. Therefore, when you are considering an AO implementation, ensure that you have allocated enough disk space, memory, and have a large enough CPU to handle all of the requirements that AO will place on it in the future.
Most of the Central Server's operation consists of scheduling the execution of PL/SQL on the database. However, it requires 20 or so database connections (problems will arise if the database connection (dbc) file has a low value for the number of connections (NUM_CONNECTIONS).
The amount of disk space is largely determined by the level of logging you want to utilize. Logging levels can be set from 0 to 4.
Oracle recommends that you use Output Level 1 in normal operations for moderate logging without slowing performance or taking up large amounts of disk space.
Level 0 returns no logging, but results in the fastest performance and takes up very little disk space.
Level 4 returns the most detailed logging, such as for troubleshooting, but results in slower performance and requires a large amount of disk space.
What calling calendars will you need?
What validation rules do you want to use?
What recycle rules do you want to use?
How do you want to handle callbacks, recovery, reporting?
What number of calls per month do you anticipate?
What is the maximum number of simultaneous outbound campaigns you want to execute?
Use the following list of questions to help determine the information about your server groups, system, and users:
What is the name of the server group you created when setting up Advanced Inbound?
Server groups are established by Interaction Center Server Manager (ICSM) as a conceptual means of associating various call center services with each other. Both the Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony Dial Server and Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony Central Server must be defined as part of a server group in order for ICSM to be able to communicate with AO. The Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony Central Server must exist only once per instance. The number of Dial Servers depends on the size and volume of your interaction center.
Only servers within the same server group can communicate with each other. Each server can be a member of one and only one server group. Every call center agent is also associated with one and only one server group. This allows the agent to connect to the services provided by the servers from that server group.
You should link the Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony Dial Server into the Server Group you created when setting up Oracle Advanced Inbound. Oracle Telephony Manager (OTM), a component of Oracle Advanced Inbound, must reside in the same server group as each Dial Server so that the teleset number of the agent's physical phone can be mapped to the teleset extension in OTM.
Have you gathered all of the necessary user information for every user of Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony?
This information should include:
Employee type
Employee name
User ID
Password
Campaigns to which they will be assigned
Assign the correct responsibilities to the Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony administrator user(s):
Oracle Marketing Campaign WorkBench SuperUser - allows user to manage Oracle Marketing campaign and campaign activities.
Oracle Marketing Audience SuperUser - allows user to manage Oracle Marketing lists and target groups.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony Administrator - allows user to manage Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony Operations.
Call Center HTML Administration - allows user to manage Call Center ICSM.
Interaction History JSP Admin - Create outcome, result and reason codes, and pair them.
Sales Online Super User - Associate agents or resource groups to campaign activities.
Before you can implement Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony, you must ensure the following tasks have been performed:
Complete an administrative-tier installation of Oracle Applications.
Complete a web-tier installation of Oracle Applications on each machine identified.
Run Rapid Install.
Rapid Install installs the Oracle8i Enterprise Edition technology stack and the Oracle Applications file system. Rapid Install installs the following:
Oracle8i Enterprise Edition (8.1.6) with interMedia Text and Spatial
Oracle Forms Server, Oracle Reports Server, Oracle Graphics, and WebDB listener
Application servers WebDB and Apache, with JServ (Web tier)
JRE (Java run-time environment)
Selected Oracle applications
Oracle CRM Foundation, including Resource Manager and Oracle Customer Interaction History
Oracle Marketing (Oracle Marketing)
Desktop Application such as Oracle TeleSales or Oracle Advanced Collections
Oracle ICSM (including all Advanced Inbound and Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony servers)
JInitiator
When you access certain parts of the system (for example, those based on Forms or Discoverer), you need JInitiator to supply the Java virtual machine. The latest version of JInitiator that was available at the time of the product release is on the Oracle Applications Rapid Install Server Technology CD, which can be found in the \util\jinitiator directory in the Common directory of your file system.
Implemented as a plug-in (Netscape Communicator) or ActiveX component (Microsoft Internet Explorer), Oracle JInitiator allows you to specify the use of the Oracle Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on Web clients instead of having to use the default JVM of the browser.
When it is needed, the browser attempts to load Oracle JInitiator. If Oracle JInitiator has not been previously installed, the browser downloads the necessary installation executable to the PC. Once installed, Oracle JInitiator runs the Oracle Forms Java applet and starts an Oracle Applications session.
Install an ACD or PBX switch and approved CTI middleware.
CTI middleware - CT Connect or Cisco ICM
Implement Oracle Marketing.
Prerequisites for the Oracle Marketing implementation include:
General Ledger (GL)
Human Resources (HRMS).
Oracle Discoverer
Oracle Workflow
Particular attention should be paid to the creation of marketing mediums as well. Marketing mediums are used in the integration with Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony to determine which user receives the approval workflow for a given campaign activity.
To be compatible with Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony, use the following Marketing source view types:
B to B - Business to Business (Organization Contacts)
B to C - Business to Consumer (Persons)
Caution: While Oracle Marketing allows you to modify the source type fields, you MUST NOT remove or modify the following fields:
Per Customer - Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony requires these fields for each customer. They are either used in the screen pop, or to check for DNC, release control, or the stop list.
PERSON_FIRST_NAME
PERSON_LAST_NAME
PERSON_NAME_SUFFIX
PERSON_TITLE
PIN_CODE
PARTY_NAME
PARTY_ID
SOURCE_CODE
SOURCE_CODE_FOR_ID
PARTY_SITE_ID
POSTAL_CODE
Per Phone Number - Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony requires these fields for each phone number.
CONTACT_POINT_ID
TIME_ZONE
PHONE_COUNTRY_CODE
PHONE_AREA_CODE
PHONE_LINE_TYPE
PHONE_NUMBER
RAW_PHONE_NUMBER
REASON_CODE
Install and implement Oracle Advanced Inbound.
Implement Oracle Universal Work Queue.
Implementation of UWQ should include the following steps:
Creation of server group(s), most likely one per call center.
Creation of UWQ classifications for the business applications implemented above.
Note: Use the Call Center HTML Administrator responsibility to associate the appropriate form with Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony (under the UWQ Media Association tab).
Set the following system profile settings for AO to "Yes":
IEU: Queue Order: Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony
IEU: Queue: Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony
Implement the business applications (Oracle TeleSales or Oracle Advanced Collections).
The business application(s) should be implemented at this point.
Once you have completed the tasks outlined in the Implementation Prerequisites topic, you can begin implementing Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony.
This topic group provides high level implementation tasks necessary to implement Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony.