The accumulation of data is becoming a problem
Have you ever found yourself struggling to find the one campaign you’re looking for in a list of hundreds? Most of those probably weren’t even active anymore.
How frustrating is it to find that you’ve clicked on the wrong one? Or even worse, used it? Even if you don’t make a mistake like that, there are other problems:
- Lists are long and hard to navigate. Administrators have to scroll and scroll, or click-select many items that aren’t all on the same page.
- Writing all those configuration files to the servers takes time.
- Reloading the configuration files takes time. For instance, Asterisk can take a long time (and a lot of processing power) reading those files and updating the live configuration. On sites with thousands of DIDs, campaigns, queues and complicated dialplans, we’ve seen it impact call quality at high loads.
- Script and dialplan builders slow down as the browser uses hundreds of megabytes to load the whole page.
This is a problem that can crop up after years of using a system. For example, clients who need separate state queues for regulatory reasons might need hundreds of queues. Add in a few years of production and retiring old, unused queues, and the number can hit the thousands. The same applies to campaigns. Then what about all the custom fields you’ve created to collect specific data and no longer use? It adds up.
In the olden days things were simpler
When Q-Suite started, this really wasn’t an issue. But now, many contact centers are coping with this kind of data overload. So with Q-Suite 5.17, Indosoft has added an archiving feature.
Almost from the start, employee turnover meant that we had to add a flag for “inactive” employees. You could choose to see all employees defined for the tenant, or just the active ones. Archiving works very much like that. Our “list” pages for campaigns, lead lists, queues, custom fields, dialplans and agent scripts have a checkbox beside each item. There is a dropdown that allows viewing active, archived or all items. You can archive or unarchive checked items with the push of a button.
When archiving an item, it can’t be selected or viewed in most places. For instance, when you’re assigning agents to a campaign, archived campaigns won’t show up. Archived dialplans aren’t visible in places where you use dialplans, like on inbound campaigns or DIDs. You can’t upload leads and assign them to an archived list. Live status reports won’t show inactive queues. And so on.
The large number of old items available in agent scripts can be tedious to scroll through, especially when you’re using a lot of conditions in your script pages. Archiving solves that problem.
Waiting for the “Go Live” page to push out configurations to servers with thousands of queues, campaigns, and dialplans wastes time. It’s resource intensive. Some clients stop using the “Go Live” during calling hours because of the stress it puts on servers. Archived campaigns, queues, dialplans, and agent scripts aren’t pushed out to servers. That can make a huge difference, and solve the server overload problem.
You can keep it all, but you don’t need it all right now
Archiving doesn’t erase any of your data. It’s all still there on the system. If you are reporting data for all campaigns and an archived campaign was dialed during that time, you’ll see data for your archived campaign. You won’t be able to select it to report on specifically, but if you need to, it’s easy to unarchive a campaign, report on it, and archive it again. Although, we would point out that if you’re still reporting on it, it may not be a good candidate for archiving now.
Archiving is a better option than straight deletion. Your data is still there. And if somebody accidentally archives a custom field used in 50 of your agent scripts, it’s easy to fix. A lot easier than recreating a deleted field than fixing everything that used it. Believe me, we know.
Q-Suite 5.17 is now available, and is our first release with archiving. Contact us to see if Q-Suite 5.17 is right for you.