At Indosoft, we support a range of customers around the world, requiring different levels of technical assistance. Our customer support department is directly manned by experienced technical staff who do everything from installation, setup, feature development, and automation, to handling phone support. Supporting a contact center software gets complicated since VoIP is an important consideration. Typical data and information systems deal will data whereas a contact center solution deals with voice and data.
Even though a call center software is an independent software system, it works together with a sophisticated technology stack consisting of telephony, web, and database software systems. Therefore the supporting call center solutions is quite involved, and it requires a wide range of skill-sets. Voice systems also have more visibility and less tolerance for down times. Therefore issues received by the customer support require prioritization based on the severity of the issue.
Since we offer phone, email and trouble-ticket access for customer support, it is important that the technical support handles issues based on urgency without totally ignoring lower priority support requests. Interestingly enough, our call center software has a multi-channel ACD that can queue phone calls, emails, and web generated trouble tickets into the ACD queues. Any number of queues can be setup; queues have a priority level and a set of skills required to handle the calls or contacts. The ability to push phone calls, emails and web requests into a specific queue is controlled at the diaplan level using the Visual Call Flow Designer tool within the call center software. The tool also offers intelligent routing to determine the final destination based on other parameters like the CallerID, DNIS, pin or postal code (collected at the IVR level). The destination can be a queue, an extension, voice-mail or an external DID.
Trouble ticket systems allow email notifications that can be very effective for both customer communication and queuing. Email notifications generated when receiving a new issue or a customer update will automatically draw the attention of the technical support staff based on the call center ACD queue. Skills based routing governed by queue priority will ensure that all customer inquiries are addressed, just not the high priority issues. In large customer support operations, such an ACD will manage multiple Asterisk servers for handling phone support as well as queue e-mails from trouble-tickets and other web channels.
It has been a long road and the technical support staff are working hard to improve the quality of support. Things are getting better with smarter tracking and management, holding us accountable for open issues. We support very large multi-tenant contact centers with multiple Asterisk servers in clusters that present a fair degree of complexity to trouble-shoot. Since we have a very good High Availability system with monitoring tools that can swiftly identify any issue, we can recover automatically for mission critical operations.