Flexibility within a Call center ACD with Agent seating and ON-Hook/OFF-Hook telephony

Large enterprise contact centers require their ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) to be flexible. The primary objective of a call center ACD is to manage routing and handling all incoming calls resulting in appropriate calls being connected to the most suitable agent. Hot desking is the flexibility available for agent seating within a call center. On-hook and Off-hook describe the state of the agent telephone device. An On-hook agent phone has to ring to incoming call, like regular phones. An off-hook agent is already connected and would hear an audible beep before a new call is handed out.

A good call center software ACD should allow agents to sit anywhere and specify an agent telephone device during login. The ACD will ring the device and the agent will answer the ring. From here on, the agent would have the ability to work On-Hook or Off-Hook. Hot desking capability of an ACD allows for sharing a phone and a desk space among multiple agents in a 7 x 24 contact center operation. For roaming agents, “agent ID” behaves like a virtual phone extension. When the agents roam, the calls coming to the roaming extension can be routed to the agent or agent’s personal queue, if agent phone is busy. In a good contact center technology platform, an ACD agent should be automatically logged into all the queues for which they have the necessary skills. Skills required for every queue is specified and skills are assigned to agents with skill levels.

Agent phones can be On-Hook or Off-Hook. An ON-Hook agent is generally a super-set of Off-Hook. For large volume call centers, it is more efficient for an agent to stay Off-Hook. The ACD will alert the agent before handing out every call with an audible beep. For call center agents who multi-task with other duties, they may prefer to stay On-Hook and will require the ACD to ring their telephone device to alert them. If agent does not accept the alert within a specified amount of time, the ACD will push the call back into the queue to be answered by the next available agent.

Scaling is an essential aspect for large contact center deployments and such features need to be scalable. Indosoft Q-Suite provides a scalable flexible ACD that can deployed for Asterisk based center.