We applied a pre-release of this and I wanted to share our experience and some pertinent info.
- It appears to work, in that there's very few calls with a long alert duration, which is what we attribute to the persistent connection being set up
- One note is that it appears to establish the persistent connection when the user logs in, not when they go on-queue as the title indicates. Probably better, in case there are calls waiting in queue at the time, but FYI
- It seems to have added on an additional delay of about 250ms to all calls, which shows up under the agent alert duration
- We find it takes anywhere from 1-6 seconds to establish a persistent connection, average 2 seconds, which results in a huge abandon rate on those dialer calls and a drop in success rate for the calls that do stay connected. We have decided to leave this enabled as a result, but the alert duration being increased on all calls is not ideal as speed to connect and agent greet time is very important in a dialer environment
Additional detail and analysis for how we determined this is below.
There are 3 key timestamps in the segment data that we use to measure these durations:
- CAResponse: The start of the 'System' segment, outbound direction, for the call session, which we understand more-or-less correlates to when the call analysis result is determined and it kids off the routing
- AgentSelected: The start of the 'Alert' segment on the agent session
- AgentConnected: The star of the 'Interact' segment on the agent session
With two key metrics calculated as:
- AgentSelected -> AgentConnected: The agent alert time
- This ignores wait time and can be used to track agents without auto-answer enabled, no persistent connection, etc.
- CAResponse -> AgentConnected: How long it took to connect the call to the agent (AKA 'call setup' time), which can include ACD selection, wait time, etc., but calls with wait time can be filtered out
- This is used to track latency, can vary from user-to-user based on their location, connection, etc.
Pulling some data and trying to "clean" it as much as possible, in terms of excluding calls from the sample that abandoned, had to wait for an agent, etc. - trying to get a true like-for-like of the call setup and alerting durations before and after the auto persistent connection change.
AgentSelected -> AgentConnected: The key metric that we've used to identify calls without a persistent connection.
- Pre-Change: There's a pretty clear split in durations; it's 30ms average alert time with a persistent connection and 2000 average without, but the without range can vary anywhere from 1000-6000+. We saw 97% of our calls < 50ms alert duration and then 3% over 1000ms indicating they needed to establish a persistent connection
- Post-Change: We see virtually nothing over the 1000 mark, indicating the feature is working. However, whereas previously the alert duration with persistent connection was very consistent at < 50ms and averaged 30ms, it's now a wider range of 200-500ms and averaging about 280ms
CAResponse -> AgentConnected: The key metric to track overall call setup time; it goes in-line with the previous data, and shows an overall jump in 250ms on average
- Pre-Change: 514ms on average
- Post-Change: 764ms on average
Note: This isn't just our data/calculations, you can clearly see the difference in the Timeline View after the change. The Alert segment used to be very short and now is longer on all calls post-implementation.
We opened a support ticket but because it's pre-GA that was shut down. We're now monitoring, trying to do additional impact analysis, and waiting for GA so that we can follow up and push this to dev, but we're certainly left with a catch-22 of greatly improving the agent connect time on 3% of calls without a persistent connection at the cost of a small degradation of agent connect time on 97% of calls that get connected with a persistent connection (pre-change or if we disable it).
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Sean Magnusen
Director of Telephonic Outreach for Home & Community
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