Music on Hold options for callers queued in CVP

[BarryMcLellan72678]

Hello,

We are using Enterprise IPCC 7.1.x, CVP 3.1.

Our users are quickly tiring of the two 30 second repeating music clips we play to them while they are on hold in our queues.

Can some of you share some of your ideas on how you do your music on hold while queuing in the CVP?

Thanks!

Barry

[sbilgi]

The MOH can be configured as per the document http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/products_configuration_example09186a0080159eb5.shtml.

But, make sure to disable fast-start on ISN dial-peer to Callmanager.

[geoff]

sbilgi - the question is on CVP, not CRS.

A current customer wants something similar. They will record 8 x 30s marketing messages and I'll store these on the media store as "qmusic_loop1.wav" etc. They could be music, of course. Get a long piece of music and cut it up into 30 sec chunks.

I play an initial greeting and a short section of inoffensive music followed by "all agents are busy".

Set a global variable "userN" type Long (not persistent) to 1. Then the loop.

Set (say) PV7 to concatenate("qmusic_loop", text(userN), ".wav"). Use a play media microapp that picks up the wave file from PV7 - syntax PM,-7. Interruptible, of course. Increment the counter, test the value and reset if greater than 8. Loop back and play all agents are busy and the next queue music WAV file.

The customer needs to make the 8 x 30s marketing messages somewhat self-contained. They need to listen to the effect as a customer in queue for 5 or so minutes to ensure smooth transitions between messages - a little leading silence helps.

An improvement would be to start with a random number between 1 and 8 and figure out how to DIV it to stop the loop and reset the counter to 1, but I gave up on that in ICM scripting. I could do it with CVP VXML but I'd rather not go to Audium for queuing.

Regards,

Geoff

[Chad Stachowicz]

This may be a dumb question but is there a 'delay' or something similar type element in CVP Call Studio? Anyone know how to make the application pause for 30 seconds and do nothing, other then playing a blank audio file..

Chad

[geoff]

Chad,

The answer is no. Play 30 seconds of silence. No "Wait" nodes in your ICM scripts for CVP - and nothing in the VXML standard for a delay.

VXML applications can do tricky things when making a back end query - look up "fetchaudio" - if that was what you were trying to do.

What's your scenario?

Regards,

Geoff

[prakashj]

Best practise is to have 8 wave files with 30 seconds and playing one by one inbetween play some music for 5 to 10 seconds and loop this until agent becomes ready.

But one of our customer showed their old avaya system which is connected to one cd player. i just asked them they said it is MOH, Queue Music etc. I understood they playing the queue music from CD.

But the same option i have tried in ICM but cisco said it is not possible. we have to breakup the wave files and put in the media server for play.

there is another option available in call manager you can have stream input for MOH.

But still u cannot utilize the MOH for IPCC queue music.

[BarryMcLellan72678]

Yes, it is very unfortunate that you cannot utilize some kind of input stream for MOH!

[geoff]

Because of the confusion, I prefer to use the term "music in queue" for the WAV files that are played from the gateway when the caller is queued there; and "music on hold" (MOH) when the caller has been placed on hold with either the phone or CTIOS/CAD (singlecast or multicast). With CVP, I push this pretty consistently with customers to remove confusion.

But it is unfortunate.

With traditional IVRs this is pretty easy to set up. At my current deployment we split the long marketing message into 8 separate WAV files, and interspersed these with "please hold, an agent will be with you shortly".

You can use ECC variables to loop with a counter, and create the WAV file name in a peripheral variable (say PV10), and then use a PM,-10 microapp to play the contents of PV10. Makes the loop compact.

This actually works quite well but a caller does not get dropped into the middle of a stream - a random starting point - like one gets with the traditional IVR.

Room for improvement.

Regards,

Geoff

[BarryMcLellan72678]

I like your idea Geoff. I would think you could even combine that with a nightly batch file which could copy over another new 8 MOH files so that you could at least have somewhat different music 7 days a week.

Now the fun part... finding MOH that everyone actually likes!

[chleblan]

Hi,

There is a new feature with CVP 7.1 ES4. You may now use streaming media via RTSP streams to play music on hold. It is supported with Real Networks Helix server. This will be available also with 7.0.2.

You can get ES4 at http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/2c2b0976c0a4a1cf9c421d08c1674a9d.

Regards,

-Chris

[BarryMcLellan72678]

Excellent! I have been looking for a list of reasons we should upgrade our CVP.

For those of you looking for MOH, I found a great website: http://www.freesound.org/

They have a tonne of stuff on there, and it looks like it is all free with no catches.

[geoff]

Thanks Chris. Good to see you here.

Regards,

Geoff

[chleblan]

Hi Geoff,

Good to hear from you. I actually coded this one.. =)

-Chris

[Chad Stachowicz]

Chris,

I'm going to give it a shot in Lab next week. Thanks for the info!

Chad

[Jermo5940_2]

I have a question we are running cvp 7.0(2) and we are boing told that Music in queue using helix

cannot be done via multicast. From you prior post am I to assume that we can? If so, can you point me to docs on the process?