Why Scheduling a Pulse campaign is important?

Problem

Cyara allows you to set, a Pulse Campaign, Start Time, and Date, as well as its frequency. It often causes confusion that the campaign will always run at certain time intervals starting with the Requested Run Date/Time.

In fact, there are several factors that impact campaign running times:

1. Campaign Duration: The total number of minutes required for the campaign to complete. If it is longer than the campaign run intervals Cyara will start skipping running cycles;
2. Concurrent Campaigns: In a case when the number of Pulse ports is low, a condition in the point 1 may cause another negative consequence when 2 separate Pulse campaigns competing for the same Pulse ports/plans. In case if a total number of ports requested by Pulse Campaigns exceeds a total number of ports available in the Pulse plan, a campaign will be queued

3. When issues occur, the campaign will be re-scheduled to run at the next configured interval and will continue skipping the run for as long the conflict continues to occur.

4. Cyara Maintenance Events: Finally Cyara Maintenance Events impact campaigns schedule because they put all the currently running campaigns on pause. When a Maintenance event is over Cyara starts all active campaigns at the same time which may cause several Pulse Campaigns to compete for the Pulse Ports.  This would again result in the campaign state into queued

Solution

A universal solution for all these 3 issues is to use a Schedule feature available as a part of Pulse Campaign functionality.

Different campaigns schedules helps to ensure that all campaigns are started and stopped at clearly defined times and days of the week. Campaign Scheduling is available in Pulse, Pulse Outbound, and Virtual Agent Campaigns.

1. When you are creating a new Campaign, if you have selected either a Pulse or Pulse Outbound or Virtual Agent Campaign, you see the Schedule option as shown:
   
2. Click the Add Schedule button to add a specific time interval to the schedule of the Campaign. A row is added to the schedule table with options to specify the ‘Week Day’, ‘From’ time, and ‘To’ time. Note that the specified time intervals should not overlap as the Cyara Web Portal will not allow more than one instance of a Campaign to be running at a time.
3. Specify the Week Day, From (HH:MM) time, and To (HH:MM) time.
4. To make changes to a Schedule, click the field to edit and make the changes directly.
5. Click the red trash can icon on the right-hand side to delete a row from the schedule table.

This feature allows to space all the campaigns in time and avoid them from clashing and competing for the pulse calls. For example:

• Campaign 1: Starts Mon-Sun on 00:00 with interval of 60 minutes and duration of 4 minutes
• Campaign 2: Starts Mon-Sun on 00:15 with interval of 60 minutes and duration of 5 minutes
• Campaign 3: Starts Mon-Sun on 00:35 with interval of 30 minutes and duration of 8 minutes
• etc..

Note:

If Campaigns clash with each other and there are no ports available for the test case to run, then the  campaign can become stuck in "Internal Error state ( Exceeded by 1 Ports)" and it will not run on its own, until someone manually runs it.