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”
Adding Complexity to the Inbound Call Center ACD
In a prior post, it was shown that preparing a simple inbound ACD scenario can be fairly straightforward. This post will illustrate a few of the more complex components that can be leveraged in Q-Suite’s dialplan builder. Continue reading “Adding Complexity to the Inbound Call Center ACD”
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”
From Call Center to Contact Center
The changing marketplace is quickly bringing about new technologies for communication including e-mail, Twitter, and SMS. Increasingly, consumers are moving to these new mediums and expecting businesses to do the same. Staying on top of these fast growing channels of communication can provide an edge to the contact center of the future.
Continue reading “From Call Center to 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”
Auto Provisioning VoIP Phones for Contact Center ACD
Unlike a standard telephone, voice over IP (VoIP) phones require special configurations to connect to the telephony server across your network. These settings can either be entered manually, or through a process called auto provisioning. Auto provisioning provides a central location for all the phone to access the configuration files necessary for them to register to your local telephony server, whether the server is on premise or in the cloud. This adds to ease of administration and reduces the overall cost of maintaining mission critical infrastructure for an Asterisk based call center.
Continue reading “Auto Provisioning VoIP Phones for Contact Center ACD”
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”
Effectively Using Alerts in the Call Center
Alerts can be an effective way to keep operations running smoothly in a call center on a day-to-day basis. The Q-Suite can be configured to utilize multiple types of events. Here are a few of the most useful types of call center alerts: Continue reading “Effectively Using Alerts in the Call Center”
The Real Meaning of Call Survival
With Q-Suite’s HAASIPP our product now features Call Survival. This is often confused with Call Recovery and the terms then used interchangeably.
To understand what Call Survival really means lets look at an example. Starting off with a caller connected over a SIP trunk and ultimately connected to an agent. The diagram below shows a simplified setup with the communication path as follows:
