Migration to Asterisk is an attractive proposition and resisting it is futile. Let us look at this more critically. TDM is gradually giving way to IP and VoIP is here to stay. Everyone will eventually look for a platform to migrate to VoIP. Call centers are no exceptions. Managing the risk of such a migration is critical. It is also important to grasp short comings of VoIP and Asterisk as they grow and manage it properly. In return, the rewards of such a migration can be disproportionately large. Asterisk makes it easy to move into IP telephony without giving up TDM. The richness of its PBX will amaze anyone. Cost savings are enormous.
For the purpose of discussion, if we classify contact centers into two broad categories, 1) willing to take no risk and 2) willing to take any risk, we will find the broad majority to be somewhere in between. I have listed some of the things that I hear while talking to technology managers associated with contact centers:
- We don’t have the expertise to manage Asterisk
As you can see, there are a lot of things. The devil is in the detail. A good manager will seek answers from the call center software vendor and will perform technology and functional analysis of the ACD within the call center software. This takes effort and will require expertise but the payoff will justly the effort.