Call recording is an important aspect of any contact center operation. Asterisk has an inbuilt call recording capability that is really good. The demanding call work-flow and associated call recording requirements for serious contact center operations are the responsibility of the call center software used with the Asterisk platform. This is more so for large call centers that scale beyond a single Asterisk server. This requirement gets convoluted as the call center ACD and Dialer software is tasked to trigger call recording based on the actual call flow, agnostic of the Asterisk servers associated with the call. Also, call recording consumes CPU usage within Asterisk servers diminishing the overall call handling capacity of the contact center setup. Continue reading “Call recording for Asterisk platform”
Architect your Asterisk based multi-site call centers
Settling on Asterisk as the telephony platform for call centers is a no brainer. It is by far the most flexible and powerful PBX available and is supported by Digium and the open source community at large. Its features are so overwhelming that spending top dollars to acquire any other telephony platform with limitations is not the way forward. Continue reading “Architect your Asterisk based multi-site call centers”
Modern technology stack drives faster Call Center Software development
Modern contact center platforms are built on top of powerful technology stack. The underlying stack makes it simpler for the developers of call center software to focus on the building functionality around the two main aspects of voice customer contact, namely the Dialer and the ACD Engine. I am not ignoring the growth in the use of social media and chat within inbound centers for live customer contact. A good ACD should treat be able to all media types and queue them in a similar fashion using skills based routing and queue prioritization.
Continue reading “Modern technology stack drives faster Call Center Software development”
Delivering more performance at lower cost with Asterisk based ContactCenters
Contact Centers are the backbone of modern web driven commerce. They handle more and more complex transactions from multiple channels and are expected to deliver higher performance at lower cost. Modern contact centers are being stretched with technology demands that require them to handle multiple channels like Voice, E-Mail, Chat and Social Media seamlessly. The economic pressures to lower cost of operation and increase productivity is ever increasing. This presents a game changing opportunity to introduce an Asterisk based contact center platform, take advantage of its incredibly flexible next generation architecture and increase performance and lower overall cost.
Continue reading “Delivering more performance at lower cost with Asterisk based ContactCenters”
Building mission critical contact centers with Asterisk
Asterisk is often referred to by many as the “Swiss Army-knife of Telephony”. It is a Soft-switch, a complete software based PBX switch with a full feature PBX and a VoIP stack supporting SIP, IAX and H323. It is also a hybrid switch with TDM support for ISDN PRI (T1/E1). The last few decades have been the age of software, propelled by the incredible power and flexibility of software driven systems. No wonder, Asterisk within a span of 10 years has overtaken all it peers and is the undisputed leader this field. Continue reading “Building mission critical contact centers with Asterisk”
Cloud is in ‘vogue’ now but Cloud contact center services have been around for a long time
Folks at Indosoft remember deploying a distributed contact center platform for one of our customers at a co-lo in Chicago sometime in 2006. Their agents were working from South America and different locations within United States. They had looked us up on the web while reviewing Asterisk related technologies. Asterisk had by then made quite an impression with its flexibility and feature-sets supporting both VoIP and TDM. Back then, PRI was the preferred telecom termination and SIP with X-lite for agent telephone was a workable option, the big challenge being bandwidth. Continue reading “Cloud is in ‘vogue’ now but Cloud contact center services have been around for a long time”
Asterisk Solutions for Contact Centers
By far the most popular telephony software, Asterisk is starting to show its presence in the high end contact centers. Its dominance in the small and medium call centers is already well known. There has been a number of Asterisk Solutions for call centers available dating back to 2004. Now larger contact center operations are charting a move to Asterisk based call center platform. They are able to make a business case based on the economic value and the cost benefit analysis. Overall, Asterisk as a PBX telephony platform provides unsurpassed feature sets for both VoIP and TDM connectivity.
Selecting an ACD for your contact center
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) has revolutionized the contact center industry by delivering the ability to manage, route and handle customer interactions systematically and efficiently. Contact center software with superior ACD deliver robust, stable and proven call-handling capabilities to many mission critical businesses. Key ACD features include call routing, automated customer interaction, queuing with prioritization and balancing, as well as skills based routing. Continue reading “Selecting an ACD for your contact center”
Integrating CRM and Custom Applications into your Call Center
Rapid growth in communication technologies over the past years has presented call centers with an unprecedented opportunity to support complex customer interactions. Independent applications, tailored to manage the business process of customer interactions, have an increasingly important role in daily call center operations and are used extensively to perform crucial duties that significantly improve productivity.
Continue reading “Integrating CRM and Custom Applications into your Call Center”
Call center migration to Asterisk
Migration to Asterisk is an attractive proposition and resisting it is futile. Let us look at this more critically. TDM is gradually giving way to IP and VoIP is here to stay. Everyone will eventually look for a platform to migrate to VoIP. Call centers are no exceptions. Managing the risk of such a migration is critical. It is also important to grasp short comings of VoIP and Asterisk as they grow and manage it properly. In return, the rewards of such a migration can be disproportionately large. Asterisk makes it easy to move into IP telephony without giving up TDM. The richness of its PBX will amaze anyone. Cost savings are enormous.