Configuring an inbound IVR that takes advantage of queues and skills-based routing is a great building block in your call center ACD for Asterisk. Even though the flexibility of the Q-Suite’s dialplan builder is high, you may encounter situations where a single IVR just may not handle all of your desired scenarios. Campaign scheduling can help you solve these issues.
Campaign scheduling allows the administrator to set up rules based on time of day, day of week, or even specific days if necessary. The most common use case for scheduling is splitting your inbound campaign between business hours and after hours. In this case, a proper IVR would be built to handle the call routing during the day and a basic IVR would take care of the after hours calls. A standard after hours IVR would contain an audio file that would state that it is indeed after hours, would outline the regular business hours, and could then prompt the caller to leave a voicemail.
Schedules can be used to handle specific days as well. If your operation is fully closed for a certain day, like December 25th, you could configure the campaign schedule to use a one-time IVR that will let the caller know that it is Christmas Day and the center is closed. This would be fairly similar to the after hours IVR described above, and would be incredibly easy to create.
Setting proper schedules when configuring your inbound campaigns for your call center ACD can be an important step in ensuring that your inbound callers are handled in the proper fashion in the cases where it may be off hours or a day that the center is officially closed.