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”
You have a bunch of agents you’d like to keep busy, but call volumes are low. You can’t send anyone home, because it might get busy later. You’ll go broke if your agents spend most of their time discussing their favorite Kardashian.
Do you have to wait for people to call in? Continue reading “Are the Kardashians Hurting Your Business?”
Some call center workflows require that a specific agent handles a particular lead. There can be many reasons why. The biggest reason is a scheduled callback: the client needs a call at another time so they can check with their wife, budget for the purchase, or any of a million other reasons. Sometimes leads are assigned from a pool, and agents are expected to work them to completion. Sometimes there’s a complicated process that kicks off from the start of the contact to completion. A mortgage application, installation of a service onsite, or similar circumstances can require a back and forth with an agent who can maintain the file until resolution. Continue reading “Managing Your Agents Managing Your Leads”
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”
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”
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”
There’s a fast-service restaurant near my house that specializes in frozen dairy products. Let’s say it rhymes with Fairy Shmeen. My order is usually something fairly simple. The drive-thru experience is usually pretty quick and painless. Sometimes, however, there’s a problem, and I have to repeat my order several times. Sometimes I have to repeat it after I’ve gotten to the window. Each time there’s a problem, it’s the same girl taking my order. I’m sure she’s an excellent employee. Maybe seniority dictates that she should have the headset. But she can’t seem to get the hang of it. At least not in my case.
Continue reading “Getting it Right When Some Get it Wrong”
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”
My wife says I should blog about the time I lost $2099.60 in the stock market. It was this week, so it’s timely. She’s one of my favourite people, so I’ll indulge her. So, I logged into the website for my discount brokerage, and found that in the weeks since I last looked, one of my new favourite investments was down a whopping $2099.60. Continue reading “Your Call Center by the Numbers, or How I Lost $2099.60 in the Stock Market”