Hosted call centers have become mainstream and are flourishing due to many important reasons. From a technology perspective, convergence of voice and data, growth of VoIP and SIP, and the availability of bandwidth have contributed to its wide spread acceptance. From a commercial angle, hosted call center solution as a managed service is attractive due to lower capital cost investment and reduced on-going up keep.
Technology platform for setting up a contact center has many moving parts. Also, modern day call center software is incredibly more complicated than any data system due to the convergence of voice and data. A well developed contact center solution will require Web and Database servers to support its interactive and powerful agent customer interaction scripting. The call flow with skills based routing and customer interaction IVR will also be Web and Database driven. As we all know very well, infrastructure and operating systems are evolving at a fast pace. On top of it, telephony has gone through a paradigm shift in the last decade. Keeping internal technical specialists for these areas is a large on-going expense that makes managed services an attractive proposition.
The contact center software requires a good telephone switch to serve as a media server for handling voice. Generally, telephony platforms are expensive and quite sedate. There is a historical reason for the slow evolution of features in telephone switches. This is due to the low tolerance for bugs and defects that come with software changes. The advent of Asterisk and the dramatic adoption of VoIP has altered all this. Asterisk, being an open-source switch is economically inexpensive to manage, but comes with phenomenal features, way ahead of all its proprietary peers.
Hosted contact center using Asterisk offers the best of both worlds. In a managed services offering, it enables service providers to deliver a tremendous feature-rich platform at a much low cost. Building a hosted contact center platform on Asterisk is simplified considerably by the availability of Q-Suite, a powerful call center software.