Contact Center Software Integration With Sangoma Lyra

There has been a decided shift in the last decade from outbound predictive dialing or auto dialing to dialing warm leads and handling inbound calls.  A call center software suite like Q-Suite is designed to accommodate all of these, allowing a smooth transition in the call center from one type of dialing to another.  For a segment of the industry, however, mass dialing is still a required part of the business.  In these cases, Answering Machine Detection (AMD) can be a key part of making mass dialing worthwhile.  A properly tuned AMD system can be the saving grace in such a campaign.  For this reason, many dialers have incorporated AMD as part of their system.  Q-Suite allows per-campaign settings of Asterisk AMD to allow maximum performance.

The overall accuracy of AMD is good, but there is room for improvement.  Sangoma, a long-time innovator in telephony products, developed Lyra with the end result of improving the results achieved via AMD.  With their patent-pending technology and an eye to use with Asterisk, Open Source solutions and integrators can benefit from the advances made in this product.  Regulations on dropped and nuisance calls when mass dialing leads sometimes leave little leeway for errors in detection, and Lyra attempts to close this gap.  Using adaptive methods to recognize machines versus human answerers, the increase in accuracy can result in a large increase in productivity when agents are no longer connected to as many machines, and also results in an improvement in compliance metrics.

Thanks to increasing customer demand for integration of Lyra with Asterisk-based call center software, Indosoft has developed Lyra integration into Q-Suite.  This offers clients the choice of using a solid, free AMD option with Asterisk, as well as the ability to select a very impressive product in Lyra when they require it.

Contact Center Software for Cloud Platform

There are two distinct approaches to setting up a Cloud platform for offering contact center services. The first approach is to use a multi-tenant contact center software to build a call center solution on a given infrastructure. The second approach is to virtualize the underlying infrastructure and replicate the Contact Center ACD in each instance. The difference in the two approaches is the level at which abstraction is introduced. Cloud contact center solution does not necessarily mean multi-tenant or virtualization. When a service provider looks at building a Cloud platform to offer contact center solution as a service, these are the two available options.
Virtualization provides the ability to run multiple instances of the operating system co-existing on a shared hardware. This abstracts the underlying resources and the service provider manages multiple instances of contact centers providing dedicated instance for every customer. This approach brings out the benefit of Cloud delivery of service and centralizes the management of the infrastructure. It does not increase the operational efficiency at the Call Center ACD level. This is often the case when service providers virtualize Asterisk to offer Cloud based services.
A multi-tenant contact center software provides the ability to run multiple tenants using the same multi-channel ACD. Here the abstraction is at the contact center software layer, allowing the Cloud platform service provider to run one instance of the multi-channel ACD to deliver contact center solution to multiple, distinct, and separate contact centers. This is preferred to a virtual contact center solution as it brings about greater operational efficiency with less management overheads. There are powerful contact center solutions that support multi-tenant operation at the contact center ACD level with great degee of sophistication. Such solutions scale by increasing the capacity of the system without creating  additional virtual instances to manage.

Cloud based contact center solutions

Cloud contact centers are gaining acceptance at a rapid pace due to the availability of quality infrastructure and internet connectivity. The growth of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the availability of larger network bandwidth at reasonable cost, started the initial migration towards centralized data centers. This infrastructure was available for use to a wider pool of geographically distributed work-force. It also reduced the cost of hiring IT and call center software experts for the management of a local infrastructure. This fueled the initial migration to Cloud contact center.
The availability of Cloud based contact center solutions as a service can be traced to the development multi-tenant software. Contact center is no exception and multi-tenant contact center software have been driving the growth of Cloud based contact center services. Multi-channel call center ACD with Skills based Routing, configurable IVR platform, Real-time and Historical reporting, and Dialer integration are the core components of a contact center software. All of these services are now available from cloud based contact center solutions.
Contact center solutions require a variety of applications like Visual IVR Call-flow Builder, Customer Interaction Scripting, CRM, voice recording, and WFM, all of which are made available as applications in the Cloud. The market share of Cloud deployments will continue to grow for the obvious reasons; contact center as a service eliminates large capital expenditures while providing the ability to scale on demand. Asterisk based contact center services in the cloud have contributed to this growth in a significant way.