There is a lot of excitement in the telecommunications world regarding Asterisk, the leading hybrid telephony switching platform, and many businesses and application builders are viewing Asterisk as a potential game changer. It is well known how Asterisk on standard server hardware, can deliver full PBX functionality, do Voice over IP (VoIP), and interoperate with standards-based telephony equipment. What makes Asterisk uniquely beneficial as a telephony switch, or more importantly, why Asterisk is considered by mature business applications required contact center ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) to service their clients.
One unique benefit of Asterisk is that it provides an extremely cost effective migration path to IP telephony. While comparing Asterisk to other telephony switching platforms, it is important to note that the underlying telephony switch is usually a substantial portion of the initial cost when buying a packaged proprietary ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) solution. Asterisk is unique as a switching platform in that it delivers a proven, open source, next-generation switch that has been tested and implemented by millions of users worldwide and is extremely cost effective. Therefore, any contact center software and next-generation ACD that utilizes Asterisk as its telephony switching platform is positioned to deliver immediate cost savings to its users. Feature-wise proprietary switches are struggling to keep up with what Asterisk offers and the gap will widen with time.
Business applications and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are domain specific and evolve over time. Interaction to provide timely, important and actionable information to customers is an essential part of doing any business let alone over the phone. Business systems and CRM should control the telephony interaction with customers. Computer Telephony Interface (CTI) allows integration of ACD and call control into business systems. This is a sure way to ensure that business systems and CRM drive the telephony interaction with customers and not the other way round.
Q-Suite is a top of the line call center ACD for Asterisk, delivering a feature-rich, scalable, out-of-the-box software that comes with a powerful ACD and a dialer. Q-Suite provides a uniform interface for CTI integration in the form of well-published API in both .NET and Socket library. This enables Q-Suite ACD to work under the hood, enabling vertical businesses to integrate CTI into any existing or new business application. This white paper on CTI integration for Asterisk based on Q-Suite makes a case for the uniform interface using a mature Contact Center ACD.