Virtual call center solutions are direct results of growth in Cloud based services, availability of affordable bandwidth and convergence of voice with data. This makes ‘contact center as a service’, both flexible and affordable. Such services offer feature-rich call center software on a reliable telephony platform without the upfront capital investment. With rich feature set available on demand, companies can focus on improving customer care and plan additional capacity by adding distributed call center workforce anywhere to manage calls effectively. These factors make a compelling case for the use of Virtual call center.
There are advantages and disadvantages of not having full control over the infrastructure and software. Depending on the level of control required, larger organizations tend to go for managed services of virtual contact center setups with right degree of control. It also meaningful to not have to acquire and manage all the various expertise required, in house. In a managed service virtual operation, the service provider will provide the necessary technology and expertise on a shared availability.
The growth, evolution and adaption of Asterisk for business phone systems is well known. It has successfully taken on many well established players in the PBX domain. What may not be very well known is the overabundant prevalence of Asterisk in managed and virtual call center operations. Asterisk is either deployed to fulfill niche requirements that complete the distributed architecture or it is the work horse delivering the bulk of the functionality for the telephony. The availability of sophisticated call center software to build Asterisk based call centers makes it possible to setup distributed and virtual call centers at a fraction of the cost in comparison to other PBX telephony platforms. Asterisk brings incredible flexibility to the contact center operations.
It will be surprising if we do not find too many Cloud and managed service offerings based on Asterisk. The economics makes Asterisk a natural telephony platform for Virtual Call Centers. Whether premise based or Virtual, Asterisk as the underlying PBX platform for contact centers is a no-brainer.