Contact Center Software for Asterisk Telephony
Information for Asterisk based contact centers
Have you ever waited, on hold, for what seemed like hours, only to get hung up on? What kind of ACD system does that? What were those people thinking? Did you like it? Do you think your clients will? Let’s assume the answer is no. What can you do to prevent it?
It turns out that there are two numbers you can control which can help prevent this tragic waste of time: Continue reading “Two Features to Improve Your Queue Servicing”
Big congratulations are in order to the authors at the Contact Center ACD Software blog. For the past year or so, primary writing duties have fallen to Shaun, and he’s been doing a great job. They just posted their 100th post a couple of weeks ago. It’s also worth noting that it’s the 60th post since Shaun took over.
That kind of consistency shows a real dedication to the subject matter. Congratulations, Shaun!
There are a lot of call centers that aren’t open around the clock. You may have one. It makes sense – it’s hard to staff all hours, and you may not really need to. So you close at a certain time. After that, callers get an after hours message, an answering service, or something else. But is that fair? Continue reading “Don’t Let Them Call You Around The Clock”
Call center agents are professionally good at saying what they’re supposed to say. It’s your job to make sure they know what that is, at any point in a call. Sometimes this can involve a lot of training. If your agent interaction script builder is good enough, you can do with a lot less training and get your script out the door (and your agents working) faster. Continue reading “Condition Your Call Center Against Agent Error”
We all know what privileges are. They’re some form of a set of rules that allow/disallow use or access to certain things. A few simple examples are a driver’s license where you need to be 16 years of age or the ability to purchase alcohol which happens to be 19 years of age here. How can you use privileges in the Q-Suite to better control your contact center?
So there was a massive 18GB patch released this Tuesday by Bungie to prepare everyone’s Destiny instance for the arrival of The Taken King on September 15th. I started my download at approximately 6pm local time. It had not completed by midnight so I set my PS4 in rest mode and went to bed. I got up in the morning to check the file’s progress, at about 7am, and I was still about 3GB shy of having the file fully downloaded. It was pretty common knowledge across the forums that there were a lot of people on all platforms that were having the same issue. With all the users trying to pull down files that large, bottlenecks were bound to happen. Here are a few tips to try to avoid bottlenecks in your contact center ACD. Continue reading “Destiny: The Taken King Patch’s Painfully Long Download Time and Trying to Avoid Bottlenecks in Your Contact Center ACD”
You always want to get the most out of your investment. Push the limits of what your server can do to get the most out of it. Asterisk gives you a great way to get a lot of calls through a single server, but sometimes people wonder why they’re hitting a limit that’s lower than others get. Sometimes it’s just a matter of bandwidth. Sometimes it’s inefficient codec usage. Overuse of an application with a flaw (such as MeetMe) can cause performance issues. Very often, it’s the Asterisk call recordings that are to blame. If you’re very, very careful, there are ways to do better with your recordings. If you’re not careful, disaster and disarray await. Continue reading “Handle More Calls With Asterisk, But Only If You’re Careful”
A lot of ink has been spilled over the years about our kettle. It’s a hard worker. However, the real MVP of our office has never been revealed, until now:
 |
||
| Our best hire ever is on the left. |
Let’s call him Tim. With only a bit of regular maintenance, Tim produces pot after pot of coffee everyday. The boost to our productivity cannot be measured. Who knows how many hours of productivity could have been lost over the years if Tim was not on the job, ready to produce a fresh pot of coffee in only minutes.
It’s a testament to the power of the coffee pot that when our old coffee maker broke a few years ago, almost a dozen employees went to the nearest Tim Hortons to procure a coffee maker. (They also needed to buy coffee). Our first Tim Hortons coffee maker died within a couple of years. It was so popular, however, that it was quickly replaced with the same model.
Are there better coffee makers on the market? Maybe. We don’t care, though. Tim is firmly part of the team, and would be very difficult to replace.
Have you ever gone to a restaurant, taken a seat, picked up the menu, and realized that the menu was a gargantuan mess of options? It’s an overwhelming feeling and makes it incredibly hard to decide on what you actually want to order. I’ve run into some awfully complicated IVRs in my contact center ACD experience, and not only are they a headache to troubleshoot, but when it comes to testing and navigating through the IVR, it’s quite annoying to have to spend all the time it takes to trial every option. If you can keep your IVR clear and concise, your customers and your support team will be thankful. Here are a few tips. Continue reading “Why Are There So Many Options? A Few Tips for Creating Effective IVRs for Your Contact Center ACD”
Some agents are meticulous about choosing the right disposition code for a call. Some aren’t so choosy, and will click the first thing that lets them finish the call. Assuming you have a way to train those latter agents, you do want to make it easier for the former agents to pick the right disposition without having to spend too much time focussing on the options. Continue reading “Four Keys to Getting Accurate Dispositions”