Contact Center Software for Asterisk Telephony
Information for Asterisk based contact centers
Yesterday, the Indosoft blog posted an article on how to turn your call center ACD into a time machine. It listed ten things you can do to make sure time passes as easily as possible for your callers. When it was being written, I thought it was a comprehensive look at the biggest issues you can face when settting up your IVR.
Then I called my cell phone provider. Continue reading “Four Simple Ways to Annoy Your Callers”
When Asterisk came along, it was exactly the sort of thing many were looking for. Telephony had been the purview of the giants like Mitel and Nortel. If you wanted a telephone system, you had to pay a lot for a fixed set of functionality. Asterisk gave similar functionality on commodity hardware and much cheaper telephony hardware developed by Digium. Continue reading “Building A Scalable Contact Center ACD on Asterisk”
Few things bother people more than having to repeat information they’ve already provided. It wastes their time, and they know it’s wasting the agent’s time, too. So why do call centers let this happen? It’s understandable if you’re calling into a PBX system and the call recipient can’t do a transfer correctly, but it’s something that can be avoided in the call center. Continue reading “Don’t Fumble The Handoff”
What happens when an agent completely bungles an incoming call at your call center? This may be the caller’s first experience with your business. A well trained sales agent just isn’t going to be as effective if they’re getting calls from your “Tech Support 2” queue. Your techs may flub sales calls. Obviously you can’t just have calls ringing the phone of anybody who connects to the system.
This is the way simple PBX queues often work. Continue reading “The Right Agent For the Job”
Imagine you have calls coming in that must be answered as immediately as possible. You also have calls coming in that don’t. Or you have a type of call that should be answered as a priority if it has been waiting less than 30 seconds, but after that it can wait like any other call. What tool would you use? Continue reading “When It Absolutely, Positively Has to Get Through the Queue”
Your MVP has been a topic of discussion in startups and small business for a few years now. The phrase usually means “minimum viable product” – the smallest set of features and functionality that can get you off the ground and have customers buying your product. There’s an MVP for your call center as well. Continue reading “Your Call Center MVP”
Thousands of volunteer experts have worked on Asterisk since 1999. This has made it into a powerhouse platform for telephony that you can use in your own system. Today it is a proven technology used by millions of users. Call centers and major PBX users are abandoning their legacy proprietary telephone switches to get the benefits offered by this Open-Source system. Continue reading “Thousands helping Millions, Helping Your Federated Call Center Deployment”
You can no longer doubt that Asterisk is here to stay in the telecommunications world. Over the last decade, the rate of adoption has been skyrocketing. Call centers are no longer complaining about Asterisk-based solutions, or worrying about having to have an Asterisk expert on-hand. With Asterisk providing a platform for contact center ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) solutions to sit on, you can transition from a legacy system to one built on readily available and mature software. Continue reading “Save Money, Do More With Asterisk-based Call Center Software”
When the center is actively handling calls, minimizing any disruptions is key. You don’t want to have your agents stop, log out, log back in, then attempt to continue as they were. Doing that is an efficiency killer. To avoid this, multiple copies of a single service can be set to run on different servers. However, data has to be kept current in order to avoid losing information when switching services from backup to master. Synchronization of information is absolutely required when we are attempting to set up redundancy for high availability in the call center.
Continue reading “Save the State: Data Synchronization Between Master and Backup Services”
A big driver of the adoption of Asterisk is the flexibility it brings. It has been called the Swiss Army Knife of telephony with good reason. As a result, there are a number of things that one can do to utilize that flexibility and add a bit of customization to their Asterisk-based call center software. In most cases, the actual amount of modification done is pretty small, but it’s always nice to know the ability exists if needed.
Continue reading “Let It Flow: Customizing Your Call Center Software Part 1- Customizing Your Call Flow”