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Populating Client Information – Part 3: Getting the Data Back Out

Data that can’t be extracted or reported is worth less than data that can be reported. In “Populating Client Information to Agents In Your ACD” Part 1 and Part 2 discussed getting data into the system and to agents. Once the agent has gotten their hands on it, there can be updates, changes or even new data that needs to be reported back. Details about the call usually also falls under the rubric of exportable/reportable data.
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Number management in Multi-tenant call center software

In any multi-tenant call center software, tenants must be able to create, assign and configure their DIDs (Direct Inward Dial) in order to be able to receive calls and direct them appropriately. The DID itself is a convenient way to determine which way a call should be directed; to an IVR, for example, or a specific PBX extension. Software like the Indosoft Q-Suite can be configured to use a DID and a schedule to determine how and when a call should be directed, with the ability to specify a dialplan and queue during operational hours and an after hours dialplan for when the call center ACD is closed. Continue reading “Number management in Multi-tenant call center software”

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Populating Client Information to Agents in Your ACD – Part 1

One of the major purposes of many inbound call centers is customer care.  Clients may call with technical issues, be updating their orders, or enquiring about new services. In this case, it’s obviously important to ensure that the agent handling the call have as much information as possible about the caller. The question becomes how do you get those details into your call center software and in front of agents?
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Trunk Selection and Cost Control – Simple Least Cost Routing

A priority for any new call center installation, once calls are being successfully dialed, is making those calls at the lowest cost.  Trunk usage charges are a very visible number, and a tempting target for savings.  It is vital that call center software offer a means of ensuring that calls get dialed in an economical manner.  An Asterisk Cloud-based call center should be no different. Continue reading “Trunk Selection and Cost Control – Simple Least Cost Routing”

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Trust, But Verify: Simple Steps to Finding Your IVR Issues

The call came first thing in the morning.  Agents were logged in, callers could dial in, but callers were not getting connected to agents.  A foundational tenet of skills-based call routing is that calls get routed to agents, so the team leapt into action.  As support techs logged in and began gathering PCAPs (Packet Captures) and poring over logs to discover the cause, we also began test calls into their IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Continue reading “Trust, But Verify: Simple Steps to Finding Your IVR Issues”

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Transitioning Q-Suite 5.7 to use Asterisk 1.8

We have been a big beneficiary of the development and evolution of Asterisk, the leading next generation telephony switch. It probably has by far the largest deployed of PBX around the world. Like every good telephone switch, Asterisk has found its way into many different business applications. It is ubiquitous in the contact center industry today. Sometimes you will have to peel the outer layers of a telecom entity to realize that the underlying telephony platform has some Asterisk based application. There are very good reasons for all this. It is as powerful and flexible as you get when it comes to a telephone switch and a PBX.

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Considerations while selecting Cloud contact center technology

The primary considerations in setting up managed hosted and cloud based contact centers are Technology, Cost and Deployment. The rapid advancements in the use of VoIP coupled with the growth of Asterisk makes the choice of technology more critical. Most systems available in the market are closed Black Box systems with limited flexibility. Deployment as well as growth and flexibility are very costly and painfully limited. Therefore your design and architecture not only impacts the immediate needs but has an effect on your growth, effort involved in future expansion and the on-going cost of running the service.

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Work Force Management (WFM) integration module within Contact Center Software

Q-Suite has a Workforce Management integration module to allow larger contact center operations to obtain real-time and historical feed of reports and statistics from the call center floor to determine productivity, staffing and performance. This module also provides for integration to third party software like call recording which depend on Agent and ACD states to monitor contact center activity. Q-Suite is a next generation Contact Center ACD and Dialer software that can feed real-time and historical data and reports to such things as Supervisor Dashboards as well as Workforce Management (WFM) Solutions, eliminating countless hours of data entry.

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Enhanced Queue Management in Asterisk with Complementary ACD

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) traditionally describes the capability of an add-on module to a normal phone system to optimally manage and route incoming calls. These telephone systems receive a large volume of calls every day. The demands placed on the level of sophistication required in an ACD for queue management and call routing has continually increased over the last decade. With increase in online marketing and global trading, remote office workforce are playing a greater role in the marketing, sales, customer service and support of goods and services sold. ACD and contact centers are a vital part of this infrastructure.

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Queue Priority Service Level and Skill Level for ACD

Queue priority is dictated by the business case. Calls into a higher priority queue should be handled ahead of calls from other queues. Once within the Queue, calls are handled based on the wait time. Even though it sounds simple enough, it can get complicated because a good ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) has skills for Queues and skills with skill levels for Agents.

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