Advanced Call Routing Customizations

Although you can administer most multi-site routing using Interaction Administrator, Interaction Director also allows customizations to meet more complex and unique routing requirements. Customization options include Director-specific structured customization points and open handler customization. You apply customizations using Interaction Designer.

Post-call customizations

You administer post-call routing using Director containers in Interaction Administrator. However, some options allow handler customizations (on the CIC servers):

• Action to take when reaching the in-queue timeout.

• Audio on hold.

• Attributes that follow the interaction to a remote destination for screen pops, for example.

• Provide specific destinations (agent, queue, server) for which the interaction waits for a certain time before considering any agent anywhere.

Pre-call customizations

You specify most pre-call settings and routing options using Director settings in Interaction Administrator. However, you can apply other routing logic using handlers.

When you install Director, it adds tools to Interaction Designer. Designer includes hundreds of basic tools, along with the specialized Interaction Director tools.

Applications built using Interaction Designer start with the notion of an "initiator" – that is, a certain event that causes the application logic to run. Just as Visual Basic and other user interface-oriented programming tools allow developers to describe what happens when clicking a certain button or some other action occurs, Interaction Designer allows authors to tie logic to events such as notifications of incoming calls to a supported carrier. The pre-call initiator is a visual building block in Interaction Designer that, at runtime, contains all the information known about an incoming call, such as the called and calling address information for the call and other information collected in the carrier's network such as CED (Caller Entered Digits).

An initiator and the logic flow associated to it are collectively referred to as a "handler" – that is, instructions for handling a specific event. Handlers are as simple or as complex as you want; Interaction Designer imposes no limitations.

By using the tools available in Interaction Designer, Interaction Director can carry out complex routing logic. For instance, you can configure Interaction Director to ignore a particular call center outside certain hours or in the case of a catastrophic failure at that site.

Whatever the complexity of the routing logic created using Interaction Designer, Director uses the information to create a compiled program that executes in its own thread for each incoming pre-call notification. This feature allows for quick routing decisions – which is critical since the carrier generally requires that the "round trip" (incoming pre-call notification plus outgoing routing direction) take less than 500 milliseconds (1/2 second). The architecture of Interaction Director supports thousands of such routing decisions every minute.