The rapid pace of innovation in Voice over IP (VoIP) technology and telephony software has been a blessing to contact centers around the world and has spurred a surge in deployment. The advantages of fully featured applications and low costs have been offset by the possibilities of service interruptions. The US patented Q-Suite Call Survival feature allows deployment of Asterisk based contact center ACD in a mission-critical and high value environment. Continue reading “Call Survival and Contact Center ACD”
Contact Center ACD and Call Recordings
Contact center ACD and call recordings go hand in hand. Call recordings are an invaluable tool for center operation. They can be relied upon for training purposes and they can be referred to for accuracy and completeness if any sort of customer dispute may arise. Continue reading “Contact Center ACD and Call Recordings”
Housing a Contact Center ACD on a Hosted Platform
As mentioned in a prior post about softphones, cutting the initial startup costs of a contact center can be a crucial step in getting your operation off the ground. While some may find it favourable to buy, maintain, and store their own server hardware in a nearby location or even on site, this might not always be possible due to the relatively enormous costs of purchasing and housing said hardware. This is where hosted platforms come into play. Continue reading “Housing a Contact Center ACD on a Hosted Platform”
Softphones for Contact Center ACD
In the ever-evolving realm of contact centers, minimizing startup and operating costs should be high on the list of items that a center should want to accomplish. There are numerous way to go about this, such as buying used office chairs instead of new ones, but if you are looking to cut costs without sacrificing functionality, using softphones instead of physical phones can be a good start. Continue reading “Softphones for Contact Center ACD”
Rightsizing your Telephony System from the Beginning
A number of common questions come up when purchasing telephony systems. One of the most important which affects costing the system is the expected usage in terms of number of users, ports and active calls. Knowing current needs is relatively straight forward especially for an existing business. However the real issue is businesses are not static and you want your new ACD/PBX system to be able to grow with your organization.
Obviously one can throw money at the issue up front and spec out the system for the projected size required in the future. However the better option is to choose a solution that can scale as your business grows without the need to replace the full system.
We find some systems have a large hardware cost upfront and limit usage via licensing so later expansion is done via purchasing new licenses to unlock the hardware already paid for. The issue here is the initial investment is large and compromises are often made to fit within the current budget which limit future growth on the system.
Two better alternatives are:
- Purchasing a system which meets your needs for the near term which can scale properly to meet the demands of the business well into the future. The Q-Suite telephony platform accomplishes this by having the built-in ability of adding additional asterisk servers and web servers to an existing installation to scale to meet the needs of a business as it grows. Recently the option of monthly licensing has been offered to save even further on initial costs.
- Using a Cloud based ACD/PBX System. This lets a provider worry about hardware upgrades, trunks, etc and allows growth in smaller increments. Look at the hosted provider VitalVox where your role is only to configure and manage the users, campaign, queues, and other features of your ACD/PBX system.
Language support and Localization for Asterisk based Multi-tenant Cloud Contact Centers
Cloud offering of call center software and infrastructure as a service, catering to on-demand growth, has greatly simplified the task of setting up a call center operation. Personal computer (PC) and adequate bandwidth are the minimum requirements to get started. Cloud service providers deploying Asterisk based contact centers around the world, take advantage of the language support and localization capabilities within Asterisk. Continue reading “Language support and Localization for Asterisk based Multi-tenant Cloud Contact Centers”
Audio alerts triggered by real-time contact center ACD activities
Automatic Call Distributors (ACD) control and manage the work-flow of a contact center. A multi-channel contact center ACD offers skills based routing and queue prioritization for phone calls, emails, and web channels. The real-time queue metrics are a good indicator of the contact center activities. Even with work-force management (WFM) software predictions, it is not always possible to staff adequately for handling sudden spurts in call volumes. Organizations should have procedures in place to handle such events. One such option is having supervisory staff and supplementary employees participate in call handling if required.
Key queue metrics like the total number of calls waiting in a given queue, the wait time, the abandon rate, and the overall service level provide a measure of real-time call center activities. A good contact center software will allow call center managers to set conditions based on the queue metrics to trigger audio alerts. Different audible alerts can be set, each specific to a particular queue metrics parameter.
Q-Suite for Asterisk is a powerful contact center ACD offering such feature as a part of its call center software. It is a multi-tenant software for setting up Cloud based fault tolerant High Availability (HA) contact center solutions. Its audible notifications can be triggered by setting conditions on queue parameters that are monitored as a part of the real-time contact center reporting. These notifications allow the contact center floor operations to initiate procedures that are put in place for handling sudden spurt in call volumes.
Email and Trouble-ticket integration for intelligent ACD routing
At Indosoft, we support a range of customers around the world, requiring different levels of technical assistance. Our customer support department is directly manned by experienced technical staff who do everything from installation, setup, feature development, and automation, to handling phone support. Supporting a contact center software gets complicated since VoIP is an important consideration. Typical data and information systems deal will data whereas a contact center solution deals with voice and data.
Continue reading “Email and Trouble-ticket integration for intelligent ACD routing”
Indosoft contact center software development evolution
As one of the early pioneers migrating our call center solution to Asterisk telephony, Indosoft sensed a shift in the market sentiment due to the gaining popularity of open source Linux. VoIP was still in its infancy in 2003 and only the very courageous were willing to venture into it for production systems. During the last decade, fast paced evolution of technology in many frontiers has worked in our favor, especially since we opted to build a contact center software from the ground up, for use with Asterisk. We also embarked on a multi-tenant software while sticking to the popular technology stack consisting of Asterisk, Linux, Apache and MySQL. Today, in the tenth year, Q-Suite 5.8 is a mature, multi-tenant, Asterisk based call center software with high availability and fail-over. It caters to small, medium and large cloud driven installations scaling seamlessly with the growth requirements.
Continue reading “Indosoft contact center software development evolution”
Contact Center ACD interface through Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI)
Large contact center installations with many concurrent users will scale to multiple Asterisk servers. This is the norm when building out a multi-tenant contact center or PBX roll out. With the growing popularity of Asterisk, it is being adopted for special mission critical applications with large concurrent users. In all such applications, the call center ACD plays a vital roll in managing queues and users. It routes the calls in the queues to the appropriate user console based on skills based routing and queue prioritization.
For more dynamic applications, the console application would want to have the real-time status information of all the calls in the queues. This data provides an opportunity to build additional powerful logic in the user consoles to better manage the calls. Such user consoles for customer service representatives and supervisors can empower them to intervene and handle calls based on the business rules of the organization.
A contact center ACD will manage multiple Asterisk telephony servers in a cluster through the Asterisk Manager Interface. Console applications can have continuous feed of the dynamic channel status information from all the incoming and outgoing calls handled by the call center ACD, by incorporating a listener in the console software. With adequate filters, this listener can be tuned to feed data to a versatile call handling logic, taking advantage of the real-time state information of all the channels, queues and users of the call center software.