Settling on Asterisk as the telephony platform for call centers is a no brainer. It is by far the most flexible and powerful PBX available and is supported by Digium and the open source community at large. Its features are so overwhelming that spending top dollars to acquire any other telephony platform with limitations is not the way forward.
Having settled on the telephony platform for your call center, let us look at the next piece, the call center software. Setting up an Asterisk based call center requires a powerful software that can leverage the power of Asterisk to deliver the functionality required for a call center. Contact center industry is a mature business domain with demanding requirements. You will require a scalable feature-rich ACD and Dialer engine capable of supporting unified communications through its ability to handle Web, Chat and Social Media.
Architecture is another important consideration. With the easy availability of Cloud infrastructure and VoIP, the call center platform should have the inherent flexibility to accommodate distributed multi-site operations. This gives the ability to decide the location of the infrastructure and the agents to respond to the demands of the business operations. With the growing availability of bandwidth and connectivity, the contact center software should not been seen as imposing limits on the distributed architecture.
Let us look at some of design considerations while setting up an Asterisk based multi-site call center operations. If there is a need to setup the call center ACD in a centralized location accessible through network, the consideration boils down to bandwidth and connectivity for the multiple call center sites. It is not necessary that the remote call center location have no infrastructure. This should be driven by the cost of acquiring bandwidth. If bandwidth with connectivity is not a commodity item, you can place some hardware in each site to minimize its consumption. There are some useful points in this article.
A scalable call center software for Asterisk should be capable of providing central control over the ACD and call routing. This allows customer facing queue and IVR setup in such a way that they can be serviced by agents from any location. Such a distributed architecture is essential for providing round the clock service to the clients around the world. There is considerable efficiency gain both in infrastructure management and workforce management. Above all, an Asterisk based multi-site installation is cost efficient to setup and manage.