In the last decade, organizations have established large contact center operations with the total number of call center agent seats exceeding one thousand. Such large capacity contact center operation requires robust, feature-rich and flexible call center ACD. Many of these systems are TDM based and expensive. With the current push for migration to VoIP, technology officers are evaluating and exploring different options.
Asterisk has emerged as a viable open source hybrid PBX telephony platform capable of supporting VoIP and PRI (E1/T1). The questions that often come up are,
- Can Asterisk based call center support large contact center features?
- How large can any Asterisk based call center ACD, scale?
Scaling and features are critical to setting up large ACD systems. Asterisk is a sophisticated hybrid PBX with unparalleled flexibility and feature-set. It is dramatically different from legacy CTI systems where the call center solution provider would develop a PBX using library provided by the board manufacturers. The functionality intrinsic to Asterisk telephony is mind boggling and ever growing. This makes it an ideal choice for any long term telephony platform. It is also unlike any CTI telephony system and does not come with a traditional CTI based API for call center software development. Keeping this in mind, let us examine scaling and call center feature-sets.
Asterisk runs on standard server hardware and the maximum number of concurrent voice channels is limited by the amount of processing power required to perform the required telephony operations. From voice recording to VoIP, CODEC and compression, everything is handled seamlessly, by the processing power of the server hardware. This sets the upper limit on the total number of concurrent calls handled by any single server hardware. Therefore scaling Asterisk for large call center setup would require an ACD outside Asterisk capable of handling multiple Asterisk servers. This is an ideal situation where the hardware is distributed and creates inherent redundancy in the call center design.
Modern call centers demand a large degree of sophistication and require out of the box features. Asterisk has inherent feature-sets to support the programing of call center features but its strength is modern telephony with seamless abstraction of IP and TDM. You will require a call center software which uses Asterisk to deliver feature-sets. Q-Suite is one such software available for Asterisk call center ACD capable of setting up pods of 200 to 300 agent seats with multiple Asterisk telephony servers. With VoIP traffic coming through Session Border Controllers, this provides an opportunity to setup multiple redundant ACD with fail-over capability. The call center ACD software scales to multiple servers to accommodate growth of the call center.