Asterisk is an incredible hybrid-IP PBX conceived by Mark Spencer and now, an ever expanding open source project. His creative brilliance and the collective effort of volunteer programmers have permanently changed the world of telephony for good. This revolution coincided with the growth of IP and internet world. Today, Asterisk quietly fulfills the communication needs of thousands of office phone systems. The ever increasing presence and use of Asterisk in call centers is due to the tremendous growth of online internet commerce and the need for customer service and support. A good call center software with ACD is essential to setup a proper inbound call center.
Typical Asterisk runs on x86 Linux machine, with voice channels from SIP, IAX and TDM. Its ability to seamlessly interpolate SIP trunks and ISDN PRI (T1/E1) makes it invaluable. The VoIP options for telecom connectivity have become increasing attractive due to improvement in quality and pricing. The phones from Polycom, SNOM and a host of CPE manufacturers come with a variety of features taking advantage of VoIP. There are many quality softphone options like X-lite and Eyebeam for use in call centers. Different applications within Asterisk like the ‘Dialplan’, the ‘Queue’ and the ‘Conferencing’ provide extremely powerful call processing, call routing and call management.
There is a keen interest in scaling Asterisk for deployment in large enterprise call centers. There are a number of factors that limit the total number of concurrent phone conversations in a single Asterisk telephony server. These limiting factors originate from the limitation of the processing capacity and the resource availability of the hardware. Factors like CODEC conversion, Voice recording, compression and disk I/O are known to diminish this capacity.
Call center software for Asterisk makes selective use of the underlying PBX functionality. Scaling Asterisk for call centers would result in very large queue size with the ability to allow skills based routing across agents logged into multiple Asterisk servers. In the latest release of Indosoft call center software Q-Suite, adding additional Asterisk telephony servers allows for easy expansion of the call center capacity. Indosoft Q-Suite has a customizable web interface for agents with powerful administrative tools, open database, self-pacing predictive dialer and a sophisticated ACD capable of providing call distribution with skills based routing.