The last ten years have brought lasting changes to telephony; nothing more significant than the convergence of voice and data resulting in the adaption of VoIP and in particular SIP. As a co-passenger in this exciting journey, Asterisk has emerged as the undisputed king of PBX. It has also become the platform of choice for various verticals including the booming contact center industry.
Though Asterisk comes with an inbuilt ACD, contact centers are a mature vertical domain requiring advanced Queuing and Call-Flow functionality. This is often provided by a sophisticated call center software. There are very advanced contact center solutions available for Asterisk that offer elaborate queue management with skills based routing. They come with powerful call flow builders to manage queues, overflow and IVR interactions.
Skills based routing with Queue Priority is an important aspect of effective call routing. Agents have assigned skills with levels of expertise. Queues have skills and priority. There are two typical scenarios. 1) Calls are waiting and an agent becomes available and 2) agents are waiting and a call comes in. Scenario one is handled with higher priority queues and the longer waiting calls determining the call distribution. Scenario 2 is handled by the higher skill-level and longer waiting agent determining the pecking order. Most contact centers will require sophisticated queue management for fulfilling SLA mandates cost effectively.
Call Flow builder is one of the most important GUI tool for effective ACD and overflow management. It provides all the necessary drag and drop tool-set to setup call flows and distribution of calls into different queues. It handles the IVR requirements, interface to databases and other essentials like voice-mail and auto-attendant. Queue overflow and time-outs can also be handled effectively by re-routing calls to other queues or centers depending on the available options.
Given the importance of the call center industry, it is not surprising that call center solutions using Asterisk are slowly becoming the main stay of this industry vertical. The overall value and cost effectiveness of an Asterisk platform will be a permanent game changer. Products like Q-Suite offer HA for mission critical applications there by making Asterisk an attractive telephony platform for deploying your call center software.