Every manufacturer has its own unique mechanism to handle human and outside interactions with the telephone switch. In most legacy systems the options are limited, restrictive and cumbersome. The advent of Asterisk changed all this with its “Dialplan”. It is tool and mechanism within Asterisk with a command language that unleashes unbelievable power and flexibility. Every Dialplan created is a set of instructions to handle inbound calls and outbound dials that come in and go out of this incredible next generation phone switch.
The flexibility and power of Asterisk Dialplan can be well understood when we look at Asterisk deployments. It is widely used as a Communications Server, a Media Gateway, a Conferencing Server, an IP PBX and a
Call Center ACD. For call center applications, Asterisk provides for the routing of calls into Queues which can be answered by Members. Dialplan plays a big part in the setup, routing and distribution of calls.
Contact center solutions require power and flexibility to distribute and route calls. There is a constant demand for increased productivity to reduce labor costs. Availability of Skills based Routing, Call Overflow management, Service Level Agreement (SLA) management, Real-time Wallboard and Supervisor Dashboards become important. A mature call center software like Q-Suite offers all these features out of the box along with High Availability and Redundancy, necessary for setting up Enterprise contact centers with
Asterisk clusters.
Q-suite ACD provides switching, routing and distribution functions for calls, some of which are triggered through Dialplan programming. Of course, a good call center software will not only enhance the functionality available within the Asterisk Dialplan but also offer call switching especially between servers within an Asterisk cluster. In such a setup, calls land in any one of the Asterisk servers and need to be delivered to phone end points anywhere within or out the Asterisk cluster.
The Visual Call Flow Builder within Q-Suite unleashes all the functionality of the Call Center ACD within Q-Suite and the underlying Asterisk Dialplan functionality. This visual graphical tool allows easy development of IVR applications with the availability of visual icons representing the IVR and call distribution functions. The simple drag and drop interface within the contact center software allows visualization of the call flow. With this tool, Q-Suite ACD consolidates Asterisk as a viable and cost effective telephony platform for medium and large contact centers requiring sophisticated functionality.
