Agent Blending

Last Updated : Jun 30, 2025 |
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Blending in POM for voice calls helps you to manage the inbound and outbound capabilities and allow the agents to move between inbound and outbound calling activities. POM uses dedicated outbound agents and a pool of blended inbound-outbound agents such that the blended agents are available to the inbound channel if inbound service levels are not being met.
The inbound mission and outbound mission are mutually exclusive. Agents working on inbound calls cannot take outbound calls simultaneously.
Agents move automatically between the inbound mission and the outbound mission based on business priorities and agent availability. The blender acquires or releases agents based on the traffic on a specific inbound skill. When the traffic is high or low or as indicated by certain parameters, blender accordingly acquires agents back or releases agents from outbound campaigns. The skill that you configure on the CC Elite configurations page is monitored by the blender for the specific zone.
Based on the inputs received from the RT_Socket package on Call Management System (CMS), the blender acquires the agents from inbound or releases agents to inbound according to the traffic on the inbound skill.
Note:
The blender does not consider an outbound agent who is in “NOT READY” state (on break), or in “IDLE” state for blending. So, the blender does not release agents from outbound to inbound.
The blender considers the following two scenarios while blending an agent:
  • The agent state changes to “NOT READY” or “IDLE” before the blender starts blending the same agent to inbound. In this case, the blender cancels the blend request for that agent and finds another agent in the next release interval.
  • The blender starts agent movement to inbound and at the same time agent initiates a “NOT READY” request. In this case, the agent moves to inbound and POM sends the “AGTBlendedToInbound” notification to the Agent Desktop mentioning the agent movement to inbound.
POM provides a global configuration for this blending behavior. For more information, see Administering Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager.
You can use the Process pending callbacks before moving to Inbound option in the global configurations to specify whether upon receiving a request to move a blend agent to inbound, POM should move the blend agent to inbound immediately or only after the agent completes all pending callbacks from the call queue of the agent.
PAM also supports manual blending of an agent. You can select an outbound agent on Supervisor Dashboard to send to inbound for specific time. The blender will not acquire the agent for the specified time duration even if the traffic is low.
Based on the agent’s zone, the PAM server managing the zone initiates an action on the agent, both for inbound and outbound.
You can perform agent blending using the parameters such as Queue Length, Avg. Speed of Answer (ASA), Expected Wait Time (EWT), and Service Level (SL). For more information about the parameters, see Avaya Aura® Communication Manager documentation.
The ASA, EWT, and SL impact the blending in some cases like:
  • In case of ASA, the system updates the value only after an inbound agent takes a call and completes the call. So if you have no agents for the inbound skill, the system will not update the ASA value irrespective of the number of calls in a queue for the inbound skill. In this scenario, the blending might not happen as per expectation.
  • If you have no agents matching the inbound skills, the EWT might be high. This might impact the blending as the system might move the agents to inbound to handle the wait period.
  • You must define acceptable values for service level and service level increments for all the skills on the Call Management System. For more information about Split or Skill Call Profile setup, see Call Management System documentation.
In cases where POM integrates with Avaya Aura® Contact Center (AACC), AACC takes care of blending. POM gets the blended agents from AACC. For more information, see Avaya Aura® Contact Center-Proactive Outreach Manager Integration.

Blending parameters

POM provides blending and skill based pacing features by monitoring four parameters received from CMS. These parameters are Queue Length, Expected Wait Time, Avg. Speed of Answer, and Service Level.
For the skill type inbound and parameters Queue Length, Expected Wait Time and, Avg. Speed of Answer, the agent release threshold value is always greater than the agent acquire threshold value. For example, if the agent acquire threshold value is 0, then the agent release threshold value must be 1 or more. For the parameter % answered within service levels, the agent release threshold value is less than the agent acquire threshold value.
You can configure either High, Med, Low, or a combination of these values of EWT Level property for a skill based campaign. POM considers the maximum value of the selected EWT levels for agent blending. If the maximum of obtained values of selected EWT levels is more than or equal to the agent release threshold value that you configured, then POM releases the agent from the outbound queue. If the maximum of obtained values of selected EWT levels is less than or equal to the agent acquire threshold value that you configured, then POM acquires the agent for the outbound queue.
On Create POM Skills page of ConfigurationsCC Elite Configurations, when you save the inbound skill with Expected Wait Time value for blending parameter, the EWT level information is saved in the database along with the existing information of the skill.
Note:
If you upgrade POM from previous version to current version, and if EWT was used as a parameter for either blending or pacing, then after upgrade, the EWT value will be defaulted to EWT high(default) to ensure backward compatibility.