Large contact center installations with many concurrent users will scale to multiple Asterisk servers. This is the norm when building out a multi-tenant contact center or PBX roll out. With the growing popularity of Asterisk, it is being adopted for special mission critical applications with large concurrent users. In all such applications, the call center ACD plays a vital roll in managing queues and users. It routes the calls in the queues to the appropriate user console based on skills based routing and queue prioritization.
For more dynamic applications, the console application would want to have the real-time status information of all the calls in the queues. This data provides an opportunity to build additional powerful logic in the user consoles to better manage the calls. Such user consoles for customer service representatives and supervisors can empower them to intervene and handle calls based on the business rules of the organization.
A contact center ACD will manage multiple Asterisk telephony servers in a cluster through the Asterisk Manager Interface. Console applications can have continuous feed of the dynamic channel status information from all the incoming and outgoing calls handled by the call center ACD, by incorporating a listener in the console software. With adequate filters, this listener can be tuned to feed data to a versatile call handling logic, taking advantage of the real-time state information of all the channels, queues and users of the call center software.