Contact Center ACD Software

Web Services API for Asterisk based ACD

2011-12-29T18:31:00.000-08:00

The dominance of Asterisk in the hybrid PBX market is unquestionable. So is the use of Asterisk as a primary telephony platform for contact centers around the world. Customer contact operations also require a powerful ACD and Dialer. Larger operations require more automation and standardized method of integration for the administration and management of the contact center software.

Well known Web Services like XML-RPC, SOAP or even XML DTD over HTTP are used commonly for tighter integration of external applications to a call center ACD. A good call center software suite should offer function and method oriented Web Services API to expose its admin functionality. These Web services can be used to feed Live Agent Stats, Live Queue Stats, Live Call Info and Call Details to external applications. Live floor information can be routed to Dashboards and Workforce Management Integration with real-time feeds.

The availability of quality call center ACD with API for CTI Integration as well as Web Services API for Admin Integration makes Asterisk telephony a compelling option for customer contact operations. The unprecedented power and flexibility of an Asterisk based contact center can be fully unleashed with the use of a contact center software suite like Q-Suite.

Asterisk telephony with complementary ACD

2011-12-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

Asterisk is one of the most flexible and powerful hybrid PBX available for building out an IP telephony platform, whether it is a premise based setup or a cloud based install. With rapid rise in the deployment of Asterisk, vertical application builders are looking for a fully developed ACD to complement Asterisk. Q-Suite ACD has been built grounds up to fit this particular need. Q-Suite is a unique full function ACD that can scale to multiple Asterisk servers. It is available for deployments in applications where customers require complete control over Call-flow and Queue management on top of the standard skills based routing.

Over and above standard features like skills based routing and queue prioritization, Q-Suite ACD offers some advanced features like superior Queue Ringall strategy, ability to monitor all channel activities as well as the capability to retain abandon calls in queues. Queue Ringall strategy provides the ability to watch and select calls from Queues at will. The monitoring of channels provides a detailed view of every call activity and call progress including Transfers and 3-Way calls with details on the channels coming in and leaving. Abandoned Call handling is a new feature allowing the ability to retain a call in the queue without the caller having to stay connected. It is possible to either retain them in the same queue or move the calls to a queue with a different priority.

Q-Suite full function ACD scales to multiple Asterisk servers and is being deployed in applications where customers require a Call Controller with complete control over Call-flow and Queue management. These advanced features provide remarkable flexibility in creating and setting up special purpose queues for unique call workflow and call handling allowing implementation of powerful agent/operator consoles through Q-Suite ACD API libraries.

Q-Suite's complementary role in providing Asterisk platform with elaborate ACD capabilities completely changes the game for IP telephony and customer contact operations.

Can Multi-channel Contact Center ACD include Social Media channels?

2011-11-12T14:33:00.000-08:00

Social Media is a powerful tool in disseminating information. It is quick, sensational and unconventional. All major organizations are paying close attention to it to further sales and marketing. Contact center technology solution providers are trying to bring social media channel as a part of the multi-channel Unified communications. This is more so with CRM providers who hope to effectively capture a social media profile of individual customers using various tools.

Inbound contact center service is about resolving customer service issues. Voice telephony channel and E-Mail channel are still the most effective way for problem resolution due to their inherent structure. Social Media conversations are unstructured and do not find immediate application in Inbound Customer Service channels.

In the past decade, direct telemarketing has used Predictive Dialer for mass contact on a one to one basis. This contact center channel has been used effectively for marketing and sales. We know that is possible to influence customer buying decisions through Social Media. Does this present an opportunity for marketing without the need to engage every individual potential customer one on one? If so, how is this different from the conventional marketing advertisements? Are we loosing the opportunity to engage the potential customer directly?

Contact center software can present an opportunity for organizations to observe and influence on-going discussions in Social Media but the anonymity is a double edge sword. In most social media discussions, the accuracy of information is questionable and anonymity inducts cynicism. Therefore conducting organized marketing for immediate sales is a challenge.

It is quite early to say how the social media channel will be standardized within the contact center software.

Next Generation Contact Center Technology Stack

2011-11-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

Making informed decisions on the technology stack required to setup customer contact center is very challenging. The overall costs of the proprietary product stack of well known manufacturers like Avaya, Cisco and Aspect are daunting. After all, their internal costs are going up for everything from salaries to marketing and everyone has to sell more or sell for more to keep up with this.

Contact Centers require everything from Web and Database to VoIP enabled telephony switch capable of handling SIP. Convergence of telephone, IM, SMS, Chat and e-mail channels is driven by necessity and the need to control labor cost. The real-time ACD queuing with Skills Based Routing requirements are different for different types of channels. Everything comes down to the ability to deploy a distributed flexible architecture capable of delivering advanced functionality.

With all this in mind, we want to setup a cost effective solution that meets our contact center requirements. Open source based technology platform provides an opportunity to assemble many of the important components of the technology stack required for setting up a next generation contact center at incredible cost savings. One of the key components in this stack is Asterisk, the hybrid IP telephony switch. Asterisk for voice telephony, Apache and MySQL for Web and Database and Linux for the server operating system cover three-forth of the technology platform requirements of any contact center technology solution.

Now, all we need on top of this is a feature-rich contact center software suite that can cope with all the demands of modern day customer interaction. The availability of Contact Center ACD with advanced features including Skills Based Routing, Predictive Dialer, sophisticated Script building, Call routing IVR Tools and Reporting tools make this a compelling option. This technology stack for contact center will exceed expectations in features, performance and flexibility and is a must to consider and evaluate.

Essential ACD Queue features for Customer Service

2011-10-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

Queues are at the heart of any ACD (Automatic Call Distribution). Most of us have experienced waiting in a Queue while trying to access customer service by phone. Call distribution within a Customer Contact Center is driven by an ACD. Efficiency of the ACD is determined by its ability to manage distribution of calls from multiple queues to its customer service representatives. Skills based routing allows distribution of calls to the most appropriate customer service representative. But there are other important features within an ACD that can assist in improving the overall performance of a customer contact center. Let us examine a few:

During peak call volumes, the contact center should have the ability to allow callers to drop out of a waiting Queue and have the ability to call them back as soon as a customer service representative becomes available. Depending on the business rule, the caller could either retain their priority in the Queue or they be called when the call volume comes down.

There should be multiple ways to manage Queue overflow. Indicators like Queue wait-time and number of callers waiting in a particular Queue point to large call volume. This requires some form of process driven intervention so that the prescribed service level in the SLA is maintained. A good ACD with skills based routing and queue prioritization should also have mechanisms to route calls to other Queues or other locations so that the response time can be managed. In the case of longer than prescribed wait-time, the call can be moved to a higher priority queue or a queue where Supervisors can login and handle calls. When the number of callers exceed what can be handled, overflow call centers can be brought in to take the extra load.

Customer contact centers require advanced ACD software to increase efficiency of their operation.

ACD behavior with Skills based Routing and Queues

2011-10-12T04:41:00.000-07:00

ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) is a software designed specifically to deliver efficient Queue management within most customer contact centers. When migrating to Asterisk, people are seeking to unleash the full potential of this dominant IP and Hybrid telephony and take advantage of its many intrinsic benefits. Q-Suite is a scalable ACD software designed to work with Asterisk, delivering and exceeding industry standard features and functionality for the customer contact domain.

One of the main features of an ACD is Skills Based Routing. Call routing based on Skills is an essential requirement for customer contact Queues to improve Service Level (SLA) efficiency. Typically, handling calls from any Queue would require one or more Skills. Every employee (customer contact rep) will have a set of Skills with Skill levels. Queues should also have priority to provide one more degree of control over call routing.

The actual working of call distribution using skills based routing is not that complex. There are two distinct cases, 1) Calls are waiting for a Customer Contact Representative to become available or 2) Customer Contact Representatives (agents) are waiting for calls. When calls are waiting and an agent becomes available, the agent can answer calls only from the Queues for which they have the required skills. Here, Queue priority should be used to differentiate between high and low priority calls. When Queue priorities are identical, skill level of the agent should dictate the call handling. When queue priority and skill levels are identical, the longest waiting call should be handled. This allows for call distribution in queues with priority levels, balanced with skills based routing enforcement where necessary. If agents are waiting and a call comes into one of the Queues, Skill level and waiting time of the agents dictate the call distribution and handling.

Indosoft’s Q-Suite 5.5 is an advanced ACD with Skills based routing that utilizes Asterisk, the leading hybrid VoIP/TDM telephony platform, to deliver power, innovation and flexibility to handle the ever increasing demands of complex customer interactions. Q-Suite ACD is geared towards providing superior performance to the call center software while dramatically reducing the costs of owning and operating a powerful Contact Center ACD.

Reporting Real-time and Historical Contact Center performance for Workforce Management

2011-09-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

Larger contact center operations require statistics and reports from the floor to determine productivity, staffing and performance. Modern Contact Center ACD and Dialers are software driven and should be capable of feeding real-time and historical data and reports to the Dashboards as well as Workforce Management (WFM) Solutions. Workforce Management software applications use real-time and historical contact center report data to optimize performance and increase productivity of the call center operations. This provides control over labor cost, increase the level and consistency of customer service, optimize employee utilization and maximize revenue generation. Management can make informed decisions by looking at key performance indicators generated from different real-time reporting sources within the contact center software.

Asterisk based contact centers can be scaled to accommodate large call centers and grow to hundreds of seats. This would necessitate the use of WFM solutions to properly manage the operations and ensure productivity. The software driving the ACD and the Dialer should provide a WFM integration module and feed detailed granular contact center performance data to eliminate countless hours of data entry.

Integrating CRM and ERP Applications To Phone Services

2011-06-11T16:44:00.001-07:00

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software record, unify and manage the business processes. It is usually industry specific and highly evolved. In most cases, there is a close relationship between phone services and CRM. The need to integrate phone services with a CRM or an ERP application is growing and presents an unique opportunity for CRM/ERP vendors to enhance product offering and increase productivity for its end-users. Phone service integration with sophisticated ACD and Dialer features will enhance the usability of the CRM and ERP software.

Asterisk is a powerful open-source IP enabled telephone switch that has revolutionized the PBX industry. It presents an unique opportunity for CRM/ERP vendors to integrate with a phone service and ACD. There are some powerful ACD and Dialer software with API for Asterisk CTI integration. The API libraries will allow application developers to incorporate the necessary CTI features at ease without the need to manage the lower levels of a telephone switch or PBX.

ACD requirements for improving efficiency through Contact Center Queue Setup

2011-05-07T08:22:00.000-07:00

Effective use of Queues and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) within a back office phone system or call center ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) will have positive impact on the overall efficiency and productivity. A versatile ACD capable of supporting flexible queue arrangement and call handling is essential to meet the queuing demands and requirements of modern inbound contact center operation.

Within a typical inbound call center setup, one or more DID numbers belonging to an inbound service will bring phone calls into the ACD. An IVR may or may not be used depending on business requirements, to automate part of the early interaction with the caller. The caller then gets branched into a particular queue and is connected to the first available agent operator with appropriate skills. Agents have skills with skill levels identifying their proficiency in handling calls belonging to queues which have skills association. Therefore agents can handle calls from queues for which they have the required skills. ACD with Queue Prioritization will ensure that the agents handle calls from queues with higher priority ahead of calls from queues with lower priority. Skills based routing and prioritization of queues are key drivers of efficiency. They also ensure that calls are handled properly by agents with the right skills based on the queue priority.

Many inbound operations require interaction with back-end databases. These databases are tied to existing CRM and ERP systems and allow effective handling of calls. The IVR capability of the ACD should include hooks and interfaces for connecting to such back-end databases.

There are other important triggers associated with queues like 'Maximum number of callers waiting in a Queue', 'Waiting time in a Queue', 'Putting a caller on Hold in a Queue' etc. These triggers should ensure follow-up actions that result in better customer care. For example, once the number of callers exceeds the set maximum number, there should be an overflow queue or the ability to add more agents to handle the calls.

Quality call center software should provide all these features right out of the box.

Blended Agents in Contact Centers

2011-03-23T19:38:00.000-07:00

Call centers are looking for efficiencies and call blending provides an opportunity to optimally use the available pool of workforce. Blended agents handle both inbound and outbound calls by being simultaneously logged into inbound queues based on agent skills as well as being part of outbound dialing. Call center ACD software will use skills based routing to handle inbound calls while Predictive dialing is the preferred method to reach out to customers, in a cost effective manner. Call blending requires an efficient mechanism to hand over calls to agents from both inbound and outbound services to maintain service level and achieve effective list penetration.

The challenges of call blending become obvious while flexing an agent from a predictive dialer campaign to answer an inbound call from a queue with a higher service level priority. A predictive dialer dials based on the anticipated number of agents available to take calls. Withdrawing an agent after the dialer has placed calls can result in "dropped calls" and is undesirable. At the same time, letting inbound calls wait in their queue till an agent becomes available increases the possibility of caller abandonment and poor customer service.

A good call center software should have smart agent blending capability. This allows agents to be a part of both inbound queues and outbound predictive dialing without service degradation. Services should have priority to ensure that the calls are being handled based on business requirements. There should be clear guidelines allowing the ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) to borrow agents working predominantly on one service (say predictive dialing) to answer another service (say inbound queue) based on factors like service level averages, minimum number of agents available and call volume. A good call center software offering effective call blending improves workforce utilization.

Top Call Center Software

2011-03-18T06:27:00.000-07:00

We often see comparative write-ups about call center software in blogs and Web-sites. It is not practical to expect a true comparison of the various contact center solutions available in the market. An objective analysis requires clear performance indicators with benchmarks. As you can imagine, it is unlikely that someone will have the opportunity to do a comprehensive study of the different call center technology solutions available, let alone experience it in actual production. It possible to define a common set of functionality and performance objectives and determine how well the various call center software solutions stack up against it.

Contact centers over the last decade have gravitated towards becoming "profit centers". The large scale trend towards out-sourcing has greatly reduced the number of call centers that operate as "cost centers". The cost of acquisition will play a significant part in the selection of your call center technology. A broad measure of a call center software can be had from,

The telephony platform driving the call center software
Cost per seat for the overall deployment
Functionality available within the call center software
Level of technical support from the vendor

Telephony platform

The telephony platform is a big part of the acquisition cost and requires careful consideration. Depending on the contact center technology vendor, this cost may or may not be an explicit line item but is bound to show up in some form. It is important ensure that your contact center has the capability to use both TDM ISDN PRI(E1/T1) and IP telephony. It is also important that the underlying telephony platform has a sophisticated PBX. PBX feature-set should be a part and parcel of this call center platform. Here, Asterisk as your telephony platform for the call center software will provide all the benefits without the cost of a proprietary telephone switch. Asterisk runs on standard x86 servers and provides the IP telephony capability. For TDM, you have Digium, Sangoma and Red-fone providing interface hardware for PRI(E1/T1).

Cost per Seat

The cost per seat is a detailed calculation. It includes the cost of the infrastructure, the cost of the call center software license and the cost of setup, training, 1st year support etc. As a thumb rule, all the essential features for your your contact center should come, right out-of-the-box. The intent is to minimize the risk of turning the deployment into a project. Projects tend to become expensive and a contact center deployment should always use a COTS (commercially of the shelf) call center software.

Call Center Software Functionality

A thorough and detailed analysis of the call center software functionality available out-of-the-box, is a must. For outbound, lead and list management, Customer agent interaction script development, predictive dialer, dialing multiple phone numbers within an account, real-time and statistical reports and quality monitoring are critical. For Inbound, it is skills based routing, Queue prioritization, IVR and the flexibility of the ACD.

Support

Contact center technology platforms are becoming more complex to manage. With a wide technology frame work involving IP telephony, Web servers, Database servers, networking, and hardware management, an internal team for individual domains will not be economically viable. Therefore your call center software provider should be willing to identify and solve problems in all these domains. It is important to consider redundant setup with high availability to ensure that you can keep your contact center up and running.

Asterisk CTI integration with Q-Suite API

2010-12-24T18:36:00.000-08:00

Introduction of VoIP has created a paradigm shift in telecommunications where reliance upon one mature and reliable protocol (TDM) is being replaced with VoIP, which enables the unification of voice and data over a single network. Asterisk as a hybrid telephone switch allows seamless interoperability of TDM and VoIP impacting everything from the choice of telephony switch to the way CTI integration and call control are implemented. As a result, different business domain applications have an extremely cost-effective migration path to an IP telephony platform.

A good telephony platform requires functionally rich ACD and the ability to scale with growth. Any CTI interface library for an ACD should provide an API that allows session management as well as call flow and control over the entire set of telephony functions. Session management decides which agent gets which call, as well as monitors agent states at any given time. Call control and flow relate to how a call can be managed once it is delivered to the agent with functions like hold and transfer. A good contact center ACD will be equipped with features like skills based routing and predictive dialing to cover both inbound and outbound capabilities.

Q-Suite is a top of the line call center ACD for Asterisk, delivering a feature-rich, scalable, out-of-the-box software that comes with a powerful ACD and a dialer. Q-Suite delivers full functionality with ready availability of industry standard features comparable to any of the high-end proprietary peers in the contact center technology domain. Q-Suite provides a uniform interface for CTI integration in the form of well-published API in both .NET and Socket library. This enables Q-Suite ACD to work under the hood, enabling vertical businesses to integrate CTI into any existing or new business application. This approach allows ease of integration and efficient applications development through CTI interface for Q-Suite ACD on Asterisk, creating an opportunity for business systems with legacy telephony to migrate to IP telephony.

Selecting your Call Center ACD software

2010-12-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

The functionality and features within your contact center technology platform has a direct impact on the efficiency and productivity of your call center. Vendors are touting VoIP (Voice over IP) platforms with remote distributed architecture as a strong alternative to the legacy systems with TDM (Time Division Multiplexing). Ultimately it is the sophistication of the features like Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), feature-rich IP PBX functionality, call recording, predictive dialing, Agent Scripting and a host of other features and reporting that will determine if your next-generation VoIP contact center can provide the competitive advantage that you are seeking.

With any high-end contact center platform, the ACD software should be geared towards allowing you to build strong customer relationships while dramatically reducing the costs of owning and operating a powerful platfrom for communicating with your customers. This white paper on 'Acquiring Inbound Call Center ACD Software' provides a detailed look at Q-Suite 5.5 and its feature set for an Asterisk based call center.

Call Center Software for Asterisk telephony

2010-10-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

Migrating to Asterisk Telephony

We are witnessing a critical change in the history of telecommunications, with a move away from one mature and reliable protocol (TDM) to a new one (VoIP), primarily due to the unification of data, voice and all other media over an IP (Internet Protocol) infrastructure. This paradigm shift has a great impact when acquiring a new generation contact center technology platform for improving productivity. Indeed, successfully migrating to a superior contact center platform can often be a competitive differentiator and should be of critical importance for large call centers. Cutting-edge Internet Protocol (IP) based contact center technology platforms have evolved to the point that highly reliable and full-featured systems are available to businesses of all sizes.

Next-generation call center software, capable of supporting both TDM and VoIP, is available and is delivering groundbreaking advancements to call centers around the world. Many of these advances are due to the superiority of the telephony platform supporting the next-generation software. For example, the use of Asterisk, the leading powerhouse of IP PBX systems and VoIP gateways, is so pervasive that it can be considered omnipresent. Asterisk has experienced universal acceptance and is a market leader in delivering an enterprise-grade telephony platform at a fraction of the cost compared to the available proprietary telephony systems.

With so many clear benefits to be had by utilizing Asterisk, the next task is to identify and deploy a feature rich ACD that is capable of functioning with Asterisk’s advanced switching capabilities.

Q-Suite 5.0: Advanced Call Center Software for Asterisk

Any Call center software must meet the existing demands placed upon modern call centers. Q-Suite 5.0, a very high-end call center ACD software solution for Asterisk, delivers the Full-Functionality requirement to call centers. It is feature-rich, scalable, out-of-the-box software that comes with a powerful ACD and predictive dialer. It has detailed reporting capabilities and is bound to satisfy the functional requirements of most advanced call centers. With Q-Suite 5.0, you can switch to Asterisk with the right contact center technology solution and migrate seamlessly to IP telephony. Q-Suite 5.0 offers reliability, required for your daily operations. It offers High Availability, with ability to ensure that you do not loose existing calls due a single failure, and Full-Functionality, the availability of industry standard features comparable to the any of the high-end proprietary peers in the contact center technology domain.

Feature set of Q-Suite 5.0 - Call Center Software for Asterisk

Inbound Features of Call Center Software

Availability in Q-Suite

ACD with Skills Based Routing & Queue Prioritization

YES

GUI based IVR Setup Tool

YES

GUI Dialplan Builder

YES

Powerful WYSIWYG GUI Script Builder for Agent Client Interaction

YES

Hot-Desking

YES

On-Hook and Off-Hook Agents

YES

Time of Day, Day of the Week Scheduling

YES

Flexible Queue Setup with Periodic Announcements

YES

Live Reports and Wallboard

YES

Call Detail Pop-ups

YES

Ability to do Database Dips

YES

Remote and Home Agents

YES

Quality Monitoring - Recording, Listening and Barge

YES

Call Recording

YES

Outbound Features of Call Center Software

Availability in Q-Suite

Preview, Agent-Ready and Predictive Dialing

YES

Sophisticated List and Campaign Management

YES

Do not Call Management

YES

Powerful WYSIWYG GUI Script Builder for Agent Client Interaction

YES

General Contact Center Features

Availability in Q-Suite

TDM & VoIP Connectivity

YES

Multi-tenant

YES

Real-time Reporting

YES

Historical Reporting

YES

Voice Recording

YES

Quality Monitoring

YES

Web Agent Interface and Native Client

YES

API for CTI Interface (.NET and Socket)

YES

Asterisk Telephony

YES

Hosted & Premise Based Installs

YES

High Availability for Redundancy

YES

Mid-call Recovery for Fail-over

YES

Full Featured GUI for PBX setup

YES

Migrating to Asterisk Telephony

The paradigm shift in technology has opened an unprecedented opportunity to enhance your call center platform, lower your cost and provide much more functionality. There has been never such an opportunity to compete and grow with industry leaders. In order to take full advantage of what cutting edge technology can deliver, a close analysis of Asterisk and Q-Suite 5.0 should remain central to your search for a next-generation contact center technology platform.

Migrating to Asterisk for Call Center setup

2010-09-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

The Flexible and Scalable Solution For Migrating to IP Telephony

The world of telecommunications is moving away from one mature and reliable protocol (TDM) to a new and more flexible (VoIP), primarily due to the unification of data, voice and all other media over an IP (Internet Protocol) infrastructure. We all understand the importance of acquiring a new or next generation contact center technology platform for improving productivity. More important is the need to successfully migrate to a superior contact center platform that can be a competitive differentiator.

However, when looking at migration options, companies should look beyond the immediate objective of achieving increased employee productivity. They should carefully examine the contact center technology solution’s underlying architecture, as well as other considerations, which have long-term impacts on their business. Along with comparing feature sets of competing contact center solutions, it is critically important to pay close attention to the call center ACD software and its underlying telephony. The ACD and its underlying telephone switch together form the backbone of your contact center technology platform. Limitations can seriously impact the ability of your contact center functionality and introduce additional costs.

Why consider Asterisk as the IP Telephony platform for your call center?
The underlying telephony switch is usually a large portion of the initial cost when buying a packaged proprietary contact center technology solution. If you are able to find a proven, next generation switch then all that remains is searching for a feature-rich ACD to go with it. In Asterisk, you have the most powerful open source hybrid telephone switch tested by millions of users worldwide. Therefore, by selecting Asterisk, you have an immediate cost saving.

Most proprietary contact center switch providers quite often have their internal teams playing “catch up” to keep their legacy CTI up to date, whether it be adding features for the switch or enabling cutting edge VoIP migration. Asterisk, on the other hand, provides all the PBX functionality independent of the underlying telecommunications connectivity, be it TDM (PRI E1/T1) or VoIP (SIP/IAX). It also provides seamless integration of the underlying VoIP and TDM connectivity. This important feature provides two distinct benefits. First, Asterisk allows working with existing TDM, and second, companies significantly reduce risk as they gradually migrate to VoIP based on company timetables rather than having to “flip a switch” when go-time is at hand.

There are other benefits inherent to Asterisk. In the past, achieving voice recording capabilities has required additional expenditure and time consuming CTI developments. However, voice recording is intrinsic to Asterisk, meaning there are no additional costs.
It is also important to note that Asterisk is designed to work in commodity hardware, including Dell and HP. Again; there are multiple benefits to this feature. The most direct benefit is that you can easily avoid proprietary equipment lock-in by utilizing a proven Asterisk based contact center technology platform. Another benefit is ease of scale. When an Asterisk server reaches its processing limit, additional Asterisk servers can be added to scale with the growth of the call center. With this in mind, the platform can also be architected to be redundant.

With so many clear benefits to be had by utilizing Asterisk, you will rightly ask “why hasn’t everyone switched?”. The answer is simple: the call center industry is mature, and it requires a suite of sophisticated features in order to cope with the demands of customer interaction today. As such, there is a need for a feature rich call center ACD that is capable of functioning with Asterisk’s advanced switching capabilities.

Capacity planning for large call centers using Asterisk

2010-08-01T06:30:00.000-07:00

The architecture of a large call center setup shown below with Asterisk as telephony platform, includes web servers for serving agent web screens and a common database server. A high end Asterisk telephony server can handle over one hundred concurrent channels with compression and voice recording. High-end call center softwares are feature-rich and offer sophisticated agent screen scripting. The demand on the Web server will increase with increasing agent seats. The Web server will have to scale ahead of the Asterisk server.

The call center ACD software will scale to accommodate the size of the call center with additional web servers and Asterisk servers. The MySQL database size will eventually limit the maximum number of agents. The incoming ports are not as big a factor due to the availability of high quality Session Border Controllers (SBC) which will provide VoIP traffic to the Asterisk servers. It has been found that even with high-end servers, the number of PRI lines using Digium or Sangoma board per server should be restricted to 8 or less due to the interrupt demands of these hardware boards on the CPU. Redfone offers another option of bringing in PRI interface without loading the server. Converting the TDM traffic to VoIP through SBC reduced the load on the Asterisk servers.

Large call center setup with Asterisk

2010-07-31T17:33:00.000-07:00

In the last decade, organizations have established large contact center operations with the total number of call center agent seats exceeding one thousand. Such large capacity contact center operation requires robust, feature-rich and flexible call center ACD. Many of these systems are TDM based and expensive. With the current push for migration to VoIP, technology officers are evaluating and exploring different options.

Asterisk has emerged as a viable open source hybrid PBX telephony platform capable of supporting VoIP and PRI (E1/T1). The questions that often come up are,

Can Asterisk based call center support large contact center features?
How large can any Asterisk based call center ACD, scale?

Scaling and features are critical to setting up large ACD systems. Asterisk is a sophisticated hybrid PBX with unparalleled flexibility and feature-set. It is dramatically different from legacy CTI systems where the call center solution provider would develop a PBX using library provided by the board manufacturers. The functionality intrinsic to Asterisk telephony is mind boggling and ever growing. This makes it an ideal choice for any long term telephony platform. It is also unlike any CTI telephony system and does not come with a traditional CTI based API for call center software development. Keeping this in mind, let us examine scaling and call center feature-sets.

Asterisk runs on standard server hardware and the maximum number of concurrent voice channels is limited by the amount of processing power required to perform the required telephony operations. From voice recording to VoIP, CODEC and compression, everything is handled seamlessly, by the processing power of the server hardware. This sets the upper limit on the total number of concurrent calls handled by any single server hardware. Therefore scaling Asterisk for large call center setup would require an ACD outside Asterisk capable of handling multiple Asterisk servers. This is an ideal situation where the hardware is distributed and creates inherent redundancy in the call center design.

Modern call centers demand a large degree of sophistication and require out of the box features. Asterisk has inherent feature-sets to support the programing of call center features but its strength is modern telephony with seamless abstraction of IP and TDM. You will require a call center software which uses Asterisk to deliver feature-sets. Q-Suite is one such software available for Asterisk call center ACD capable of setting up pods of 200 to 300 agent seats with multiple Asterisk telephony servers. With VoIP traffic coming through Session Border Controllers, this provides an opportunity to setup multiple redundant ACD with fail-over capability. The call center ACD software scales to multiple servers to accommodate growth of the call center.

ACD - A PBX feature or a Call Center Application?

2010-06-28T19:08:00.001-07:00

The demarcation has blurred in the last decade. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) has a very broad definition now. Traditional phone switches (PBX) which provide phone extensions and connectivity to Telco, offer all the normal functionalities for call handling including Auto-attendant, Direct inward dialing, Find-me follow-me and voice-mail. Call center ACD handles Agents (as opposed to plain extensions), detailed IVR (interactive Voice Response) and Queues. The degree of sophistication within the PBX as well as call center ACD applications have evolved considerably. Automatic call distribution (ACD) is not limited simple call distribution, but an opportunity to created clever mechanisms to enrich interactions with the callers. Cost-effectiveness and increase in productivity are the key factors driving businesses to incorporate sophisticated ACD.

PBX manufacturers offer many basic ACD features as a part of the ACD. Most offices require some form of call distribution and these ACD features go a long way in fulfilling the requirements of small and medium enterprises (SME).

ACD used in most call centers will be a distinct software application connecting to a PBX. The PBX will provide all the telephony interfaces leaving the ACD to deliver more sophisticated features. Basic ACD features include Skills Based Routing, Queue Prioritization, On-hook/Off-hook Agents, Agent Grouping, Agent Hot-desking, Live Dashboard, Supervisor Monitoring, Detailed Reporting, IVR and a Scheduling tool. Different ACDs will offer varying degree of sophistication and flexibility. An ACD software will convert a normal PBX into an efficient call handling and distribution system to meet the extreme communication demands of modern day online businesses.