Hunt Pilots, Groups, and Browsing Extensions – Making Your Own Call Center!

Oh no, you’ve just been given control of the IT group. You are trying to build your own miniature call center with hunt groups, but you have no way to accurately report on it. Who’s taking calls? Who’s not? How much time are your agents spending on the phone? How would you ever reward your top performers if you don’t know who they are?

Did you know that The Cisco CDR Reporting and Analytics app has functionality that will let you track exactly this sort of information?

The Simple Setup

The setup is pretty simple, it only involves setting up groups and subgroups. Click Setup then Define Groups (optional). You’ll see a few options – you can import and export data as CSV so that you can use your favorite spreadsheet program to edit it more efficiently. Feel free to do that, but really for testing purposes we really just need to add a few manually. Click over to the ​“Add New Extension/​Group”, fill out the fields and click add. (NOTE it does NOT clear out your values when you click add – it sort of assumes you’ll now make a few tiny changes and click the add button again, so it just leaves it there for you. Do not make the mistake of clicking ​“Add” a bunch of times on a single item accidentally!) Repeat until you have either all your needed extensions or at least enough that you can start playing with the reporting to see how it works.

You may only need group defined, but in many cases subgroups can help a lot as an extra way to slice and dice your fledgling call center.

The way better, though slightly more complex setup

You can configured this to talk to LDAP (well, Active Directory is the only one we know works) using another free Splunk app.

Please see my blog on setting up AD integration!

Browsing Extensions

Click Browse then Extensions.

By default you’ll see that all groups and all subgroups are selected. Of course this isn’t what we need, so click the group dropdown and select the group you just created.

And that’s it! Welcome to the world of reporting on your agents!

Well, I lied there. It’s all that you have to do, but you’ll notice as you look around that screen you DO have more options.

I recommend just playing with them – most are pretty straightforward like Name and Number. Except maybe one key drop down – Subgroups aren’t actually related to the group you have selected, they are instead separate things. But we ran out of names.

If you want instead to search/​report on hunt pilot instead of or in addition to your recently defined groups, you can do that also by using the hunt pilot field. Sometimes this is useful to weed out calls unrelated to the hunt group, like personal phone calls.

The time dropdown behaves as you would expect too.

There is one field with two options that may not be immediately clear: the show dropdown lets you pick to show two different (and separate) things.

• Selecting numbers with zero calls includes all the defined group and subgroup entries. So if you have 14 people’s numbers in the group ​“Call Center” but only 11 of those people were working today. Without this selected, you would only see the 11 people with records today. With this selected, you’ll see all 14 (so it includes the people/​numbers with ​“zero” calls).
• By including calls with zero duration, the totals will include calls in the count that, for whatever reason, have a zero duration. Obviously it shouldn’t affect the total durations, only the counts.

And one last field to point out – there’s a field selector near the top right of the data pane. fields 12 of 14 selected. Drop that down to enable or disable the fields available.

But Jack doesn’t believe Jill was on the phone more than he was?

All of the information contained in that report can be checked and confirmed on other screens in the Cisco CDR Reporting and Analytics app.

The most powerful – and easiest! – way to get to the most important of the screens is to just click on any single row in the results. This will show you the details of the calls, including the other calls from or to that number, directly to the Extension Detail page.

You could also just point your browser to Browse > Calls and change to the timeframes and numbers in question and see what’s really up. ​“Nope, Jack, see? There is who she talked to, when she talked to them and how long she spent. Face it, she’s just better than you.”

Final Thoughts

There are lot of useful capabilities tucked away in the various screens in our menus and the impact they may have isn’t always obvious from a glance.

I hope this is enough to get you using groups, subgroups and the entire Browse Extensions page to their full advantage.