Contact Center Software for Asterisk Telephony
Information for Asterisk based contact centers
I was on the receiving end of a fairly vicious cold this week and I think I’ve almost got it beat. Let us hope! Winter can also go away as well.
This got me thinking about some of the most commons reasons why your call center ACD may be sick, or just behaving poorly. Here are a few big ones. Continue reading “Call Center ACDs and the Common Cold”
We ran into a bit of a troubleshooting situation fairly recently. A few different clients were reporting that calls were disconnecting. Not only were calls disconnecting, but they were disconnecting at reproducible durations. Right away, given the nature of the drops, we can rule out normal every day occurrences, like horrible cell phone reception or driving through a tunnel. Continue reading “Why are my calls disconnecting? I’m not in an elevator!”
As internet users, we were all exposed to one of the most ridiculous debates of all-time a short while ago: Is the dress white and gold or blue and black? It was (clearly) blue and black. However this leads me into my next topic. As a user of contact center ACD software, what do I see? Let’s talk a bit about privileges. Continue reading “White and Gold or Blue and Black?”
I’m going to ramble a bit here about a personal experience I had a few days ago. I was calling in to Rogers to ask about their new tiers on Internet packages. The one that looks the most similar to mine, as far as details and pricing, is significantly better so I want to know if I can get a no hassle, no cost upgrade to this new tier. I eventually get sent to the Loyalty department, where after about a minute or so, I get put on hold. After about 15 minutes, Skype apparently decided I was connected for too long and disconnected or I hit the hold timeout for that queue, which is annoying in either case. However, while being on hold a few things popped into my mind. Continue reading “Keeping callers (or me in this case) interested…or at least trying to”
First off, we can say that both of these data structures are quite often referred to as IVRs. Let’s have a look at some of the main differences between the two in the Q-Suite. Continue reading “PBX Auto-Attendants vs. CTI Dialplans”
Asterisk, the a game changing hybrid PBX, comes with a customizable Diaplan that allows control over all facets of inbound and outbound calling. Dialplan, an important functional component within Asterisk, offers an internal mechanism and tool to introduce, modify and control call-flow through it rich syntax.
Call center solutions for Asterisk will require a full-function ACD to provide essential features like skills based routing, queue prioritization, queue callback, supervisor dashboards, real-time and historical reporting. Larger contact center ACD additionally scale to multiple Asterisk servers in a cluster to handle the maximum concurrent call volume. In this call-flow, the calls will go through an IVR to flow into the different queues of the ACD for skills based routing.
Q-Suite offers a visual tool for the customers to develop effective and powerful Interactive Voice Response systems. Its Visual Diaplan Builder comes with a large library of functions within an intuitive GUI tool to build call-flows for effective call handling and distribution. This includes the functionality available from the Asterisk Dialaplan as well as the rich call distribution functionality of the ACD. It can be further enhanced with libraries for TTS (Text to Speech) and ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition).
Call routing is a critical function of an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). Routing strategy is an abstract term indicating the measure of the flexibility available within an ACD governing its call routing capability. The strategy available within a PBX is different from the routing options within a sophisticated ACD. For an incoming call, the destination end point in a PBX is an extension. When deployed with an ACD, it is an ACD agent using the PBX extension. The ACD agents are part of different groups within the setup of a sophisticated call center software. Typically agent groups are trained to handle specific business functions. All incoming calls for these business functions would be part of one or more queues.
Continue reading “ACD Routing Strategy”
Continue reading “Essential Queue behavior for Multi-channel ACD”
Continue reading “Asterisk telephony with complementary ACD”
Continue reading “ACD behavior with Skills based Routing and Queues”