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Managing your call center software technology stack

The economic impact of Linux and Asterisk are immeasurable. Contact center software built to run on top of this powerful technology stack can offer a greatly superior platform at considerable cost savings. Technology managers are starting to realize the benefits of Asterisk, a powerful hybrid PBX that can also serve as a media server and a protocol gateway. This VoIP switch runs on Linux, the dominant server operating system. For many years now, Linux has dispensed away the need for endless licensing costs enforced by the proprietary operating system software of the earlier decade.

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ACD Inter-Operability with PBX switches simplifies remote and at-home agent setup

In many organizational setup, phone system is in place well before anything else. If a decision is made later to add customer service or support operations internally, it involves setting a full function contact center ACD.  This ACD will handle among other things, all the IVR (Interactive Voice Response), Queues, Skills based Routing, time of the day scheduling and associated call center activities for the planned customer service or support. Once an enterprise level call center software is identified based on functionality, its inter-operability with the existing office PBX will determine if the call center agents can also be a part of the same extension schema for uniformity within the organization.

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Integrating Chat, Email and Twitter into ACD with Skills based Routing

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) has evolved to provide an efficient mechanism for routing and distributing incoming phone calls to the right agent in a timely manner and increase the productivity of the contact center. A sophisticated Call Center ACD offers Skills based Routing where calls are routed into separate queues based on the number dialed by the caller or the options selected through an IVR interaction after the call lands in the phone system.

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Visual IVR Builder for Q-Suite ACD

A Visual IVR Builder is an essential part of any call center ACD. The Visual Dialplan Builder within Q-Suite 5.7 allows the user to create and rapidly deploy multi-level interactive voice response (IVR) applications at ease. It is a visual call flow builder with icons to provide a graphical flow of the call. The sophisticated IVR and call distribution functions within the Builder allows vertical and horizontal call-flow development with the ability to transfer control to different pages with the IVR. It also offers revision management. Continue reading “Visual IVR Builder for Q-Suite ACD”

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Chat management through ACD Skills Based Routing

Chat as a communication means is not as synchronous as a voice call. The responsiveness of an individual wanting to engage in a chat cannot be controlled. This introduces challenges in efficiency of operation while integrating Chat into the distribution scheme of a Contact Center ACD. In a multi-channel environment within the contact center, Chat can be treated on par with telephone inquiries. This makes Chat an equally expensive channel to man and run in comparison to web self-service options.

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Q-Suite 5.7 integrates Orecx for Call Recording

Call recording is vital to contact center operations. Q-Suite 5.7, the industry leading call center software for Asterisk based contact centers, now offers network based call recording through integration to Orecx. In larger call center installations requiring voice recording, off-loading voice recording to network based call recorder increases the concurrent call handling capacity of individual Asterisk servers controlled by Q-Suite. Continue reading “Q-Suite 5.7 integrates Orecx for Call Recording”

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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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Complexities of Call Center Software development

Not often do we sit down and analyse call center software from a software development perspective. We are all familiar with data systems where the software primarily deal with data storage, retrieval and work-flow. Voice systems are a combination of telephony and software dealing with voice communications and CRM software (Customer Relationship Management). Though they have similarities, development of call center software is far more challenging. Continue reading “Complexities of Call Center Software development”

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Asterisk Implementations with Call Centers features

Asterisk implementations stretch from using it as a plain vanilla PBX to Call Center applications with ACD queues and anywhere in between. Most implementations blur the border between PBX and Contact Centers in part due to the versatility of Asterisk and also the tendency of its users to push the boundary a bit. The growth and proliferation of Asterisk as a call center PBX is a testimony to its exceptional value and the rapid convergence of voice and data. Asterisk is one of the earliest soft-switch that seamlessly integrated TDM and VoIP.

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