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Large Multi-tenant Installations using Asterisk

 

Cloud and managed services are driving the growth of multi-tenant platform for PBX and Contact Centers. The heart of such a platform is the underlying telephony engine. Asterisk is one of most versatile and powerful telephony engine available today. In reality it is a complete communications platform packing the functionality of a soft-switch, a protocol gateway, a media server, and a VoIP gateway. Above all, it is a full function PBX with a very large ecosystem supporting application development on it.

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Features and trends dictating Multi-tenant Cloud services using Asterisk telephony

The global forecast of the Unified Communications market as a service is astounding. Predominant delivery of this service will be through Cloud based installations offering managed multi-tenant PBX and contact center ACD functionality. Asterisk PBX, the world’s leading  telephony engine, is  a complete platform for communications  that can fulfill the role of a soft-switch, a protocol gateway, a media server, and a VoIP gateway. With a world-wide following, it exercises considerable influence over the trends in the multi-tenant Cloud offering of PBX and call center services.

From its humble beginning as a hybrid PBX, it has risen to a position of consequence with serious implications for the legacy technology platforms. By virtue of being one of the most powerful telephony platforms with an extensive ecosystem, Asterisk offers functionality unmatched by most of its PBX peers.

Cloud based multi-tenant platforms for Asterisk can scale to multiple Asterisk servers with an external ACD, taking effective control of the switching through the Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) available for individual servers. Powerful multi-tenant contact center ACD software for Asterisk work in a similar way.

The work-flow requirements for Unified Communications is a blend of inbound, outbound and PBX functionality. The PBX functionality includes everything from auto-attendant, find-me-follow-me, to advanced call routing on an individual basis. Organization require conferencing capabilities, email to voice-mail functions and a host of features like virtual cloud extensions, call accounting, ring groups, and ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) from the PBX.

Inbound call center ACD features include queues driven by skills based routing, powerful IVR, call routing, and call distribution. Queues have skills association and calls are routed to the appropriate staff available at the time. The ACD provides powerful real-time stats. Outbound workflow has changed dramatically in the last decade. From mass dialing, it has become selective dialing driven by effective CRM. The integration to CRM packages like Salesforce, Netsuite and Microsoft Dynamics provide visibility into the life cycle of leads.

Most Cloud multi-tenant PBX installation achieve greater marketability by offering call center functionality along with the PBX. A multi-tenant contact center software will be incomplete without offering full function PBX. The user-interface of a good Unified Communications system should blend inbound, outbound and PBX functions.

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Multi-channel ACD in a Cloud setup

Cloud is the new frontier for voice telephony and the contact center ACD (Automatic Call Distribution). The convergence of the transport mechanism for Voice with Data through Internet Protocol (IP), the acceptance of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the default standard for Voice over IP (VoIP) transmission, and the consolidation of infrastructure accessible through Internet, have created a favorable environment for the growth of ‘Cloud’ based contact services.

Depending on the size and scale of a contact center operation, there are some options on how best to migrate to the Cloud. The larger operations can move to managed services in a Cloud platform where they exercise control over the operation without actually owning all the infrastructure. The smaller operations can be a part of a multi-tenant installation that is segmented and partitioned to provide an exclusive setup. Both these options provide a number of advantages including lower cost of setup and operation as well as the ability to have a geographic distributed work-force.

A multi-channel ACD handles more than voice. The additional channels may handle Chat. Email, and Social media. The ACD serves to distribute the conversations based on skills based routing but the media in the individual channels are handled by the respective media server. In the case of voice communications, the media server is the PBX switch. Asterisk dominates this category as a hybrid PBX which works seamlessly with both VoIP and the traditional Time Division Multiplexing (TDM).

The underlying technology stack for setting up multi-channel contact center ACD does not differ very much between a premise installation or a data center installation in the Cloud. With a competent hosted service provider to offer managed services, this can dramatically reduce the associated Information Technology (IT) operational cost. Also, sites with good connectivity offer the ability to have geographically distributed and remote agents. Some contact center software are multi-tenant by design and this enables the hosted service provider to offer shared IT resources for its tenants, thereby lowering the overall operational cost.

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Visual Tool for Building Multi-level IVRs in Asterisk-based Contact Centers

Visual Call Flow Builder

Every manufacturer has its own unique mechanism to handle human and outside interactions with the telephone switch. In most legacy systems the options are limited, restrictive and cumbersome. The advent of Asterisk changed all this with its “Dialplan”.  It is tool and mechanism within Asterisk with a command language that unleashes unbelievable power and flexibility. Every Dialplan created is a set of instructions to handle inbound calls and outbound dials that come in and go out of this incredible next generation phone switch. Continue reading “Visual Tool for Building Multi-level IVRs in Asterisk-based Contact Centers”

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SIP Proxy with Load Balancing for Contact Centers deploying Asterisk Clusters

 

In larger installations with high concurrent call volume, the contact center ACD manages and controls multiple Asterisk servers in a cluster. Since call volume at any given instant can exceed the capacity of a single Asterisk server, a SIP proxy will serve to distribute calls evenly with load balancing.  The ACD maintains the sequence and order of calls coming to the individual queues, irrespective of the Asterisk servers into which the calls come in. It will route and distribute calls to the available agents based on skills based routing, irrespective of where their phones are registered to. Sophisticated call center solutions offer greater flexibility allowing agents to use any external phone like home land-line phone or a mobile phone or a phone behind another PBX. This is ideal for remote and work-at-home options.

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Asterisk based ACD to complement Softswitch solutions

Soft-switches allow service providers to unify voice and data traffic in one network. In an IP network, service providers wanting to roll-out IP-PBX, long distance services or VoIP driven services use either Class 4 or Class 5 softswitch.  With the convergence of voice and data and the emerging domination of packet switching over circuit switching, we see a lot of softswitch implementations. They are primarily geared towards offering Hosted IP-PBX solutions and long distance services. Continue reading “Asterisk based ACD to complement Softswitch solutions”

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ACD for setting up large managed contact center services

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is integral to any contact center offering unified communication services. It transcends voice, encompassing other media like E-mail, Web, Chat and Social Media. ACD provides the ability to build and deploy sophisticated call and media flow culminating in skills based routing to the most appropriate agent or customer contact.

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Bandwidth considerations while setting up distributed Asterisk-based call centers

Recurring infrastructure costs become an important consideration while setting up distributed and multi-site contact center operations.  This is especially true when you have an MPLS network connecting the different sites.  Day to day operations require great degree of centralized control over the call center ACD setup and the bandwidth costs will increase dramatically unless the infrastructure is designed optimally. We will discuss some of these considerations below.

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