Asterisk is often referred to by many as the “Swiss Army-knife of Telephony”. It is a Soft-switch, a complete software based PBX switch with a full feature PBX and a VoIP stack supporting SIP, IAX and H323. It is also a hybrid switch with TDM support for ISDN PRI (T1/E1). The last few decades have been the age of software, propelled by the incredible power and flexibility of software driven systems. No wonder, Asterisk within a span of 10 years has overtaken all it peers and is the undisputed leader this field.
Contact center industry has immensely benefited from Asterisk. It has dramatically driven down the cost of setting up customer contact operations. I remember watching closely an advanced 100 seat contact center setup in 2000 which came around 10K per seat. This enormous cost was driven by the technology stack of Dialogic boards, Microsoft servers, Dell hardware and Interactive Intelligence driven contact center software. It was supposed to deliver productivity increases to justify this high initial capital investment. The weight of the Capital cost and the inability of the project to deliver revenues to sustain on-going costs killed the company.
Today you can setup a distributed and sophisticated 100 seat contact center more powerful than ever for less than a one-twentieth of this cost. How did this happen? We can attribute it all to the power of the open source technology stack for contact centers. One key component in this stack is Asterisk, the hybrid IP telephony switch. 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.
With software driven systems (open or proprietary) risk mitigation is important for mission critical systems. Software systems can exhibit bugs that can manifest in an unexpected fashion causing disruption to normal operations. It is important to select a contact center ACD that uses the power of software, detects mal-functioning sub-systems and provides redundancy and fail-over capabilities. A redundant system with fail-over mechanism is capable of ensuring that on-going and new calls into the contact center and ACD are preserved. Contact centers operating with a mission critical mandate require such a fail-safe mechanism for the calls to survive a single failure at any given time.
The availability of such an ACD and Dialer software for Asterisk makes this technology stack complete. With Q-Suite 5.5, Indosoft presents you with the capability of setting up a mission critical contact center technology stack on Asterisk. The contact center software has a sub-component built in to watch, detect and fail-over to redundant sub-components. Inbound call centers will benefit tremendously from this capability to continue operation without disruption when there are disruptions like hardware failure.