The rapid pace of innovation in Voice over IP (VoIP) technology and telephony software has been a blessing to contact centers around the world and has spurred a surge in deployment. The advantages of fully featured applications and low costs have been offset by the possibilities of service interruptions. The US patented Q-Suite Call Survival feature allows deployment of Asterisk based contact center ACD in a mission-critical and high value environment. Continue reading “Call Survival and Contact Center ACD”
ACD Queue Core Features
This blog is called ‘asterisk acd’ so lets review some core features one would expect with a system providing ACD queues. These features are some of the key functionality that allow ACD queues to improve customer relations and call taker productivity.
- Queue Priority. Often higher priority queues are requirements for a center. These allow higher priorities callers to be answered sooner than the others but when all things are equal the longest waiting caller is answered. Using a mix priorities with queues requires a well thought out configuration to balance the number of call takers are assigned to which queues as you want to ensure the lower priority queues are still served in a timely manner.
- Queue Overflow. This can mean a few things. First is once a queue has hit the high water mark for callers waiting in queue any new callers can be directed in the dialplan to avoid an excessive wait. Second, once in the queue if callers wait beyond a time limit they can leave the queue and go to another or elsewhere in the system. The last is to skip the queue if no call takers are currently logged in that would service that queue and continue in the dialplan to either a staffed queue or any action needed.
- Queue Callback. Allows a caller to keep their position while not waiting on the phone. This is typically a DTMF triggered option that is announced while they wait in the queue and might, and usually should, confirm the number to be called back.
- Queue Announcements including Position. Allows playing a message to any caller waiting in queue. This can be helpful to announce their position in the queue so they have an idea of how long they will be waiting. I would not include wait time as previous answer times are often not accurate for those currently waiting, it is especially bad if the times announced are past by the caller.
- Queue Reporting. To manage all of the above and ensure their configuration is working as expected one needs to be able to monitor the state of the queues. This would require a combination of a WallBoard to watch queue status in real time plus a historical report to allow mining data from the past to predict future needs and/or adjustments.
The Real Meaning of Call Survival
With Q-Suite’s HAASIPP our product now features Call Survival. This is often confused with Call Recovery and the terms then used interchangeably.
To understand what Call Survival really means lets look at an example. Starting off with a caller connected over a SIP trunk and ultimately connected to an agent. The diagram below shows a simplified setup with the communication path as follows:
Localization and Other Benefits of Inbound Call Routing
When handling inbound calls, directing calls to the appropriate destination while balancing resource availability is key to ensuring an optimal experience for the caller. For many call centers, skills-based routing ACD call center software is all that is needed. Other centers may have differing demands. In some cases, calls may be routed in different ways depending on various criteria, such as location, the DID dialed, user input or information pulled from the client record while still in the dialplan.
Continue reading “Localization and Other Benefits of Inbound Call Routing”
Contact Center ACD and Call Recordings
Contact center ACD and call recordings go hand in hand. Call recordings are an invaluable tool for center operation. They can be relied upon for training purposes and they can be referred to for accuracy and completeness if any sort of customer dispute may arise. Continue reading “Contact Center ACD and Call Recordings”
Call Center Software for Cloud Deployment using Asterisk
Asterisk is a versatile VoIP PBX telephony engine that has experienced phenomenal growth from inception. Its market penetration is not easily measurable due to the diversity of applications using it. It should come as no surprise that Asterisk has a significant presence in Cloud installations as it can function as a telephone switch, a media server, a protocol gateway, and a conference bridge. Asterisk has become a preferred choice for the underlying telephony platform for setting up distributed multi-tenant PBX and call centers.
We are seeing more providers choose Asterisk or telephony platform built around it for their cloud deployments. For example a recent announcement about VitalVox selecting the Q-Suite platform which uses Asterisk.
Most providers are not going to roll their own Asterisk solutions due to the extensive toolset needed to maintain the dialplan while separating multiple tenants easily. This is where the value of a product like the Q-Suite comes into play as it handles low level configuration of Multi-Tenant PBX and Contact Center. Then of course there are Reports which are also included in these products which provide real time and historical system utilization, call stats, etc.
Contact Center Software Integration With Sangoma Lyra
There has been a decided shift in the last decade from outbound predictive dialing or auto dialing to dialing warm leads and handling inbound calls. A call center software suite like Q-Suite is designed to accommodate all of these, allowing a smooth transition in the call center from one type of dialing to another. For a segment of the industry, however, mass dialing is still a required part of the business. In these cases, Answering Machine Detection (AMD) can be a key part of making mass dialing worthwhile. A properly tuned AMD system can be the saving grace in such a campaign. For this reason, many dialers have incorporated AMD as part of their system. Q-Suite allows per-campaign settings of Asterisk AMD to allow maximum performance.
The overall accuracy of AMD is good, but there is room for improvement. Sangoma, a long-time innovator in telephony products, developed Lyra with the end result of improving the results achieved via AMD. With their patent-pending technology and an eye to use with Asterisk, Open Source solutions and integrators can benefit from the advances made in this product. Regulations on dropped and nuisance calls when mass dialing leads sometimes leave little leeway for errors in detection, and Lyra attempts to close this gap. Using adaptive methods to recognize machines versus human answerers, the increase in accuracy can result in a large increase in productivity when agents are no longer connected to as many machines, and also results in an improvement in compliance metrics.
Thanks to increasing customer demand for integration of Lyra with Asterisk-based call center software, Indosoft has developed Lyra integration into Q-Suite. This offers clients the choice of using a solid, free AMD option with Asterisk, as well as the ability to select a very impressive product in Lyra when they require it.
Tradeoffs with Answering Machine Detection on Asterisk
Answering Machine Detection (AMD) is something that interests everyone running a predictive dialer or other automatic dialing. As discussed previously, the changing world of outbound dialing and telephony leaves call center software users looking for ways to wring additional efficiencies from their lead lists and call floors, and AMD appears to be one of those ways. Continue reading “Tradeoffs with Answering Machine Detection on Asterisk”
Call Center Software in the Cloud Still Requires Security Considerations
One of the advantages of moving call center software to the Cloud is the lower cost of managing your infrastructure. Despite this, it is still vitally important that you do manage the infrastructure. Security holes are always being discovered, and keeping your software up to date and following best practices will help your platform from becoming exploited. Continue reading “Call Center Software in the Cloud Still Requires Security Considerations”
Which Telephony Interface for your Solution: VoIP Gateway VS PCI card?
What is your PBX or CTI solution without an interface to the outside world. One can use VoIP but there are still a lot of systems going the traditional route and connecting to a Telco either via Analog (POTS) or a T1/PRI/E1. With Asterisk the two main solutions to do this are an internal PCI card or an external Gateway device. Both options will make and receive calls from the telco but which one is better?
I’ll cut to the chase and say PCI cards should not be recommended for High Availability solutions. They can still have their place in a system without HA and where costs are a major factor, but the decision to use them should be made with their limitations in mind.
Using a Gateway device, such as Patton or Audiocodes, provides the following benefits over an internal card:
- Multiple telephony servers can connect to a single gateway. Which is important for the next two items.
- With multiple servers connected to a single gateway in a HA solution calls will be routed to the active server(s).
- Load balancing done at the gateway level in a high volume centers to distributed calls across servers.
- Independence from a single server. If a specific server needs to be rebooted or taken offline for maintenance a gateway will keep working.
- Location of telco demarc can be independant of telephony system. This can be in a different room, floor, building or even country. Just be careful of lag causing issues. But given the proper connections can allow moving the IP PBX system into the cloud while still supporting traditional telco trunks.
- In a mixed trunk environment of VoIP and traditional telco connections the Gateway can abstract this so the IP PBX’s configuration is similar for all trunks.
- Scaling up only requires adding a new gateway and a configuration change to the telephony system which minimizes downtime and risk. Mainly due to avoiding the need to open the system to install new cards.
Considering the above it is hard to see the case for a PCI card, especially in an HA solution. They may still have their place elsewhere but I’ll be recommending a VoIP Gateway going forward.