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Setting up Managed Hosted Contact Center Service

The expansion and evolution of managed hosted data services and SIP trunking has contributed to the growth of call center as a service. Businesses want to avoid capital investment in purchasing technology platforms to run their call center software. The cost of managing such sophisticated infrastructure is not cheap. The new generation telecom providers who provide SIP trunks and internet services are eagerly capitalizing on this opportunity to offer ACD and Dialer solutions to expand into call center services. The hosted data center providers also see this as a chance to expand into a new service area and offer contact centers on demand.

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Social Networking, Contact Center operations and Customer Satisfaction

You guessed it right. The new buzz in marketing is “Social Networking”. It is interesting to see how technology providers are pursuing this buzz. We recently had Salesforce announcing acquisition of Radian6 to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversations within its CRM platform. Now Cisco has released a self-commisioned whitepaper on next generation contact centers conducted by Forrester. It mentions customer dissatisfaction as a key finding. We all deal with customer service for services like banking, insurance, phone plans, cable and internet. I have left out many more services. The general perception is that customers are left unsatisfied while dealing with customer service contact centers to resolve outstanding issues.

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X-lite default setting hangs-up the phone if you are silent

Last updated: August 10, 2016

We have clients using our call center software Q-Suite with a variety of IP-phones and softphones. One of the popular softphones is X-lite and its licensed version eyeBeam. There are times when it takes considerable investigation of a problem to identify the cause. Recently we came across one which warrants a mention.We were investigating complaints about calls being dropped. Generally with VoIP and SIP, this raises all sorts of alarm and as always, we started a detailed investigation to determine cause of the connection drop between the softphone and the our contact center platform. Many of our customers are hosted multi-tenant contact center service providers and the usual suspect is the infrastructure. In this case, the debug log did not point to anything suspicious until we noticed a pattern of agents being silent before the the softphone sending a ‘BYE’. This was happening without any agent action. The SIP user-agent (X-lite) was hanging up. It did not take very long to determine the culprit within the X-lite settings. You have the screen-shot with the red arrow pointing to the checkbox.

X-lite seems to by default, check the ‘Call Inactivity’ check box and inflict considerable headache any to contact center technical staff who relies on default settings. We noticed it when the call center agents were waiting on one end listening to the interaction between their customer and an automated third party verification IVR. The more sophisticated the call center software suite, the more you will have to button down all the setting carefully. Silence suppression is an option not supported by Asterisk.

Other softphones have similar functionality. For instance, Zoiper phones appear to have a “Keep alive time-out” setting that defaults to on. Recent versions allow you to control that yourself under the “Advanced” tab of the Account options. Be sure to check out your particular brand of softphone for the same kind of settings.