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”
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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Growth of Asterisk in Contact Centers
Asterisk is a mature new generation hybrid PBX that fulfills all the traditional PBX needs and satisfies all the VoIP requirements. Asterisk’s vast feature set has significant advantages over its peers. The pioneering work by the developer community has introduced Asterisk into all imaginable facets of communications over the last decade. Continue reading “Growth of Asterisk in Contact Centers”
Web Callback within Multi-Channel ACD
Company web-sites provide a unique opportunity to gather expression of interest or inquiries and channel it directly to the sales and marketing operations. This is an excellent source for warm prospects and should be accorded higher priority than the outbound campaign sales operations. In a multi-channel contact center with ACD and Dialer, Web callbacks are unique. Even though they will result in outbound calls, they can be prioritized and channeled through both list based based dialing as well as Skills based Routing to the most appropriated available agent for an immediate callback.
Hosted Call Centers
Hosted call centers have become mainstream and are flourishing due to many important reasons. From a technology perspective, convergence of voice and data, growth of VoIP and SIP, and the availability of bandwidth have contributed to its wide spread acceptance. From a commercial angle, hosted call center solution as a managed service is attractive due to lower capital cost investment and reduced on-going up keep.
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Large contact center deployments
Large contact center deployment can start with an install base of few hundred seats, going all the way to thousand plus seats. Using “number of concurrent calls” is a better measure of the capacity of the contact center platform but many legacy manufacturers use agent seat counts for licensing purposes. Continue reading “Large contact center deployments”
Asterisk usage in Virtual Call Centers
Virtual call center solutions are direct results of growth in Cloud based services, availability of affordable bandwidth and convergence of voice with data. This makes ‘contact center as a service’, both flexible and affordable. Such services offer feature-rich call center software on a reliable telephony platform without the upfront capital investment. With rich feature set available on demand, companies can focus on improving customer care and plan additional capacity by adding distributed call center workforce anywhere to manage calls effectively. These factors make a compelling case for the use of Virtual call center. Continue reading “Asterisk usage in Virtual Call Centers”
SaaS and Cloud deployments – Important considerations for Managed Services
There are a variety of reasons why companies are considering a move to Cloud or SaaS (Software as a Service) based contact center setup. The foremost consideration is the flexibility in terms of capacity and call center location. This has a bearing on the cost of the setup and on-going management. There are other aspects like on-going access to more recent technology, better functional capabilities and reducing internal IT resources for on-going upkeep. Ultimately it is the total cost of ownership and the return on investment that decides if managed services is the right option for a contact center operation. Continue reading “SaaS and Cloud deployments – Important considerations for Managed Services”
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”
Advanced Queues and Call flow Applications on Asterisk platform
The last ten years have brought lasting changes to telephony; nothing more significant than the convergence of voice and data resulting in the adaption of VoIP and in particular SIP. As a co-passenger in this exciting journey, Asterisk has emerged as the undisputed king of PBX. It has also become the platform of choice for various verticals including the booming contact center industry. Continue reading “Advanced Queues and Call flow Applications on Asterisk platform”