Softdial Campaign Manager™

Campaign Scheduler

The Schedule tab/ page (Fig. 1) allows a schedule to be set for the starting and stopping of a campaign.

Campaign Schedule - Web Client

Fig. 1 - Campaign Schedule - Web client

All times in the schedule are in local time zone of the Windows Server machine where Softdial Campaign Manager™ server is installed.

The single checkbox in previous versions has been replaced with 2 checkboxes (Fig. 1):

  1. Schedule start campaign at start of day
  2. Schedule stop campaign at end of day

This offers greater flexibility in the automation of start/ stop events, and interacts with the times in Schedule settings (see Setting start/ stop times below) as follows:

If Schedule start... is

  • checked, the times set in the Start time column are acted upon. If the campaign is already running, the scheduled Start will be ignored
  • unchecked, the times set in the Start time column are ignored

If Schedule stop... is

  • checked, the times set in the End time column are acted upon. If the campaign is not running, the scheduled End will be ignored.
  • unchecked, the times set in the End time column are ignored.

The Softdial Campaign Manager™ scheduler has 2 events:

  1. start - will start the campaign if it is stopped
  2. stop - will stop the campaign if it is started

To set start/ stop times:

  1. click on a cell
  2. pick the desired time from the dropdown (15 minute resolution)

See also Setting allowed calling times below.

To disable a single start or stop event, set the time to 00:00:00

This behaviour depends on the software version:

Softdial Campaign Manager™ is designed with the understanding that if a user takes an action

  • outside the scheduled time, the campaign start/ stop control belongs to the user. For example:
    1. A campaign is configured to start at 7am and stop at 5pm
    2. The user manually starts the campaign at 6am
    3. Softdial Campaign Manager™ marks the campaign as "user start" in the logs and will not stop the campaign.
    4. The user must stop the campaign manually
  • inside the scheduled time, the campaign start/ stop control belongs to the schedule. For example:
    1. A campaign is configured to start at 7am and stop at 5pm
    2. The user manually starts the campaign at 8am
    3. Softdial Campaign Manager™ will stop the campaign at 5pm

The following rules apply:

  1. If the campaign has a scheduled start time, you may not start manually before the scheduled start time (on the same day)
  2. If the campaign has a scheduled stop time, you may not start manually after the scheduled stop time (on the same day)
  3. If the campaign has only a scheduled stop time (i.e. no scheduled start time), you may start manually at any time (on the same day) before the scheduled stop time. The campaign will stop on schedule.
  4. If the campaign, which started on schedule, is manually stopped and restarted, it will stop on schedule.

In the following 4 cases, Softdial Campaign Manager™ will not attempt to restart scheduled campaigns during the same day (based on tenant local time).

  1. User stops campaign
  2. Campaign runs out of data and is configured to stop automatically
  3. Unrecoverable database error
  4. Systemic database performance issues (> 1 minute statement processing lag)

From V10.7.1671 - The default behaviour is to attempt restart on schedule the next day that the campaign is scheduled to run.

Tenants who want to enforce that a campaign should not be scheduled next day can set the registry value 'UserStopCancelsScheduleAlways' with a nonzero value.

The checkbox Allow 24-hour operation (Fig. 1) gives two options regarding allowed calling times:

This allows calls to be initiated whenever a campaign is running and there are agents logged in.

In the example in Fig. 1, the campaign is started at 09:00 on Monday (set in Schedule settings). Calls will be initiated whenever agents are available until the campaign stops at 21:00 on Friday (i.e. events set to 00:00:00 are disabled.)

Extra options are revealed (Fig. 2) to further restrict allowed calling times to within the specified start/ end times (the 'calling day').

Setting the Calling Day

Fig. 2 - Setting the Calling Day

Start

In the example in Fig. 2, the campaign will be started at 08:00 (set in Schedule settings). Agents can be logged in and working in other areas, but no calls will be initiated until 09:00 (set as Start of calling day).

If the Start time is set to 00:00:00, the campaign will not start.

Stop

The campaign will stop at the earliest time set in either Schedule settings - End Time or End of Calling Day.

If the End time is set to 00:00:00, the campaign will stop at End of Calling Day.

In the example in Fig. 2, the earliest setting is End of Calling Day at 19:30, so the campaign will stop then.

The settings in Retry Options for Don't reschedule before/ after have been removed and are governed by the settings here.

If any time boundaries set in Retry Options fall

  • outside the 'calling day' set here, they will be further restricted to the 'calling day'
  • inside the 'calling day', they will be respected
  1. A scheduled event may not be processed until up to 50 seconds after the specified time. This means that events for a single campaign spaced less than 50 seconds apart may not be processed.
  2. The scheduler requires a minimum of 2 events to operate. If it has 1 or 0 events, the scheduler will operate as though the scheduling is turned off for that campaign.
  3. After changing a campaign schedule, scheduler does not immediately act upon the schedule, i.e. the current state of the campaign remains unchanged. The scheduler will process the next pending event at the due time.
  4. After start of the Softdial Campaign Manager™ service, Scheduler processes the last event according to the current time. i.e. if the last event is a start event, the campaign will start running.

The schedule applies to each individual campaign, i.e. a scheduled event will be processed for the individual campaign only. This allows you to schedule the use of separate number lists as you wish.

If you want to keep the same schedule for both link master and links, you should either

  1. enter the same schedules for each campaign, or
  2. make use of the template facility to duplicate the schedules.

Scheduled events performed on link and link master campaigns differ as follows:

    Campaign type
    Link master Link
Scheduled
event		 Start will start the link master only will start the link. If the link master is not already started,
the link master will start, too
Stop will stop the link master only.
Links will remain running		 will stop the link only.
The link master will remain running