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”
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”
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”
When you have a previous relationship with your client, it’s important that this be reflected in the customer experience. Often, the data concerning the client is available in a separate system from your call center ACD software. Continue reading “Where’s My Data? Accessing External Data Sources in your Call Center Software”
In Populating Client Information to Agents in Your ACD – Part 1 I talked about getting your client data into your call center ACD software. That’s an important step, but it doesn’t complete the task. Today I want to address the topic of finding the particular contact who is calling in and presenting that information to the call center agent. Continue reading “Populating Client Information to Agents in Your ACD – Part 2”
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?
Continue reading “Populating Client Information to Agents in Your ACD – Part 1”
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”
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”
When handling inbound calls, directing calls to the appropriate destination while balancing resource availability is key to ensuring an optimal experience for the caller. For many call centers, skills-based routing ACD call center software is all that is needed. Other centers may have differing demands. In some cases, calls may be routed in different ways depending on various criteria, such as location, the DID dialed, user input or information pulled from the client record while still in the dialplan.
Continue reading “Localization and Other Benefits of Inbound Call Routing”
Outbound dialing in the call center has undergone a revolutionary change in the past decade. In October of 2004, the Supreme Court of the United States allowed a ruling from a lower court to stand that enabled the FTC Do Not Call regulations. The widespread registration of home phones, along with restrictions on dialing cellphones (and their increasing share of the number of phones outstanding), signaled a massive shift in the way outbound contact centers would operate. Automatic or predictive dialing was not killed off then, but it has been in critical condition since. Continue reading “Warm Leads and Outbound Dialing in Today’s Environment”