Years into the VoIP revolution, call center managers are recognising that it’s not necessary, or even desirable, to have all their agents located in a single location. High speed Internet access is nigh ubiquitous, allowing the modern call center floor to be distributed over multiple locations. It’s no wonder that call centers have experimented with home-based and remote agents; it’s like having a location of one. If the center is already leveraging the multi-site capabilities of its call center software, the ability should exist to include additional single-user locations. Continue reading “Remote Agents in the Modern Call Center”
Rapid Reconfiguration of Servers For Cloud-Based Call Centers
Hosting your call center software in the Cloud, as regular readers of this blog know, allows for a flexibility in the allocation of resources that is simply not available in on-premise call centers. In a large call center deployment, a number of servers are usually provisioned for specialization: web servers, database, telephony, etc.. Changing conditions can mandate that the mix of servers should change over time. In these circumstances, it is important to have the ability to quickly repurpose a server. Continue reading “Rapid Reconfiguration of Servers For Cloud-Based Call Centers”
Cloud Storage in the Call Center
Over at the Indosoft blog I made a post about Cloud storage in the contact center. Using the Cloud for storage when your call center is already in the Cloud is a no-brainer. However, we are seeing the adoption of Cloud-based storage for on-premise call centers as a way to get around some of the issues that arise when archive recordings. Some of the post may be of interest to readers of this blog, so I encourage you to give it a read.
Using Cloud Storage With Your Contact Center
A problem many call centers have to wrestle with is holding onto call recordings. Contracts will often specify the retention of recordings for a set period, and legal or regulatory issues may mandate recordings be kept for even longer, or forever. Even with declining costs of storage media, it can be a struggle to maintain an infrastructure that can expand to store recordings as volumes grow, while allowing for easy retrieval as demanded. Your call center software will likely make accomodations for whichever method you choose, but it is still up to the call center to provide the storage infrastructure. The explosion of Cloud storage provides an answer for many call centers facing this dilemma. Many providers offer easy access with API and web controls to upload, download and manage files. Continue reading “Using Cloud Storage With Your Contact Center”
High Availability for Large Asterisk based contact centers
Cloud based call center software cater to very large systems. Asterisk is by far the most widely used telephony platform. As a natural evolution, the use of Asterisk in both Cloud and large premise based installations have come a long way. Technology for call center software is to some extent driven by the ‘assemble and build’ mode where various accessory technology element available in software form come together to deliver the final solution. Call center software depends on the underlying PBX technology and other technologies for web, database, SIP, and redundancy. Continue reading “High Availability for Large Asterisk based contact centers”
Load Balancing on Multiple Asterisk Servers
Load balancing in Asterisk can be an overloaded term. In some cases, it refers to spreading calls to multiple servers. In others, it refers to calls made outbound. There are other cases as well. The two cases mentioned are two that are not handled by Asterisk out of the box, and additional software may need to be introduced in order to handle them. In multi-server Asterisk call center installs, load balancing allows calls to be distributed more evenly which prevents overloading any particular server. Continue reading “Load Balancing on Multiple Asterisk Servers”
Migrating Tenant Components in Q-Suite 6
A dichotomy we have observed with the Q-Suite, but one that is certainly not limited to our clients, is that for any complex feature we introduce some clients will ignore (or at least use it to the minimum and never touch it again), while others spend man-months of effort pushing the limits of capability to leverage it to the maximum. Continue reading “Migrating Tenant Components in Q-Suite 6”
Monthly Licensing Allows Flexibility on a Budget
When Indosoft first entered the telephony world, near the turn of the century, most of our deployments were small. Two-server predictive dialer or Do Not Call blockers ruled the day, and usually involved a lot of work to get integrated with the call center. As a result, we had an inflexible pricing and payment policy, with the costs coming upfront. Since those days, the IT and telephony world have undergone a dramatic change, as has our product line. Over the last year Indosoft has experimented with monthly per-port pricing. This option has been a hit with our clients, and is more frequently expected by new clients. The widespread acceptance of on-demand pricing for hardware has led a push for on-demand pricing in other categories, and the software that runs on those servers is an ideal candidate. Continue reading “Monthly Licensing Allows Flexibility on a Budget”
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”
Indosoft improves its Help Desk Customer Support with Q-Suite’s Multi-Channel ACD
Providing technical support for Information Technology (IT) or Software products world-wide is challenging enough; supporting call center software that controls and drives contact center operations is even more demanding. These operations are perceived as mission critical and demand immediate problem resolutions, often skewing the normal work-flow plans. Unlike normal software and IT systems, voice telephony based contact center solutions are more visible and attract significantly more attention from the stake-holders when things are perceived to be not functioning in the expected manner. In today’s business culture of wanting everything as a commodity, it is a difficult task to convince the upper management for the required investments up-front, like setting up fully redundant systems, doing proper trial runs and planning the production runs thoroughly. This is also largely in part due to the commercial success of excellent open source telephony platforms like Asterisk, forcing the contact center domain to become more commodity driven. Continue reading “Indosoft improves its Help Desk Customer Support with Q-Suite’s Multi-Channel ACD”