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ACD Queue Core Features

This blog is called ‘asterisk acd’ so lets review some core features one would expect with a system providing ACD queues. These features are some of the key functionality that allow ACD queues to improve customer relations and call taker productivity.

  • Queue Priority. Often higher priority queues are requirements for a center. These allow higher priorities callers to be answered sooner than the others but when all things are equal the longest waiting caller is answered. Using a mix priorities with queues requires a well thought out configuration to balance the number of call takers are assigned to which queues as you want to ensure the lower priority queues are still served in a timely manner.
  • Queue Overflow. This can mean a few things. First is once a queue has hit the high water mark for callers waiting in queue any new callers can be directed in the dialplan to avoid an excessive wait. Second, once in the queue if callers wait beyond a time limit they can leave the queue and go to another or elsewhere in the system. The last is to skip the queue if no call takers are currently logged in that would service that queue and continue in the dialplan to either a staffed queue or any action needed.
  • Queue Callback. Allows a caller to keep their position while not waiting on the phone. This is typically a DTMF triggered option that is announced while they wait in the queue and might, and usually should, confirm the number to be called back.
  • Queue Announcements including Position. Allows playing a message to any caller waiting in queue. This can be helpful to announce their position in the queue so they have an idea of how long they will be waiting. I would not include wait time as previous answer times are often not accurate for those currently waiting, it is especially bad if the times announced are past by the caller.
  • Queue Reporting. To manage all of the above and ensure their configuration is working as expected one needs to be able to monitor the state of the queues. This would require a combination of a WallBoard to watch queue status in real time plus a historical report to allow mining data from the past to predict future needs and/or adjustments.
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The Challenge of VoIP System Failures Not Addressed by Most High Availability Designs

Hardware or software can fail at anytime and induce a system failure. It is not possible to reduce such failures to nil. When VoIP based systems experience such failures, it results in the loss of on-going calls. High availability (HA) or redundant systems cannot address this unless they are capable of restoring an on-going call without either one of the end-points re-initiating the call. Most high availability system for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based VoIP calls and their redundancy setup, deploy an immediate replacement of the failed component/sub-system to allow continued use of the system. It is good enough for many situations but it might not be adequate for mission critical applications when the HA cannot not restore on-going calls.

Imagine a scenario where an outside caller initiates a call and when it hits the demarcation point of the contact center installation. This could be a premise based contact center or a Cloud set up offering virtual contact center services. When the call setup reaches the intended peer and conversation starts, it is possible that your system, either Cloud based or on-premise solutions, could experience a failure. Once the system detects a failure, its high availability and redundant setup will kick-in and the system will be ready for future calls but what happens to the on-going call? They just die. This is the normal operating mode of traditional high availability systems including most high availability solutions offered for Asterisk. This issue becomes more critical for large contact centers using automatic call distribution (ACD) with significant traffic at any given time.

With contact center ACD, the importance of going beyond the traditional high availability is extremely important. Having the capability to keep calls alive through call survival is critical. This will allow the user to continue the phone conversation without the need for re-initiating the call. It is a sophistication in offering redundancy that goes beyond recognizing the need to bring into action the replacement software and hardware components. It introduces intelligence required in preserving all the on-going calls essential for mission critical systems.

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Rightsizing your Telephony System from the Beginning

A number of common questions come up when purchasing telephony systems. One of the most important which affects costing the system is the expected usage in terms of number of users, ports and active calls. Knowing current needs is relatively straight forward especially for an existing business. However the real issue is businesses are not static and you want your new ACD/PBX system to be able to grow with your organization.

Obviously one can throw money at the issue up front and spec out the system for the projected size required in the future. However the better option is to choose a solution that can scale as your business grows without the need to replace the full system.

We find some systems have a large hardware cost upfront and limit usage via licensing so later expansion is done via purchasing new licenses to unlock the hardware already paid for. The issue here is the initial investment is large and compromises are often made to fit within the current budget which limit future growth on the system.

Two better alternatives are:

  1. Purchasing a system which meets your needs for the near term which can scale properly to meet the demands of the business well into the future.  The Q-Suite telephony platform accomplishes this by having the built-in ability of adding additional asterisk servers and web servers to an existing installation to scale to meet the needs of a business as it grows.  Recently the option of monthly licensing has been offered to save even further on initial costs.
  2. Using a Cloud based ACD/PBX System. This lets a provider worry about hardware upgrades, trunks, etc and allows growth in smaller increments.  Look at the hosted provider VitalVox where your role is only to configure and manage the users, campaign, queues, and other features of your ACD/PBX system.
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Audio alerts triggered by real-time contact center ACD activities

Automatic Call Distributors (ACD) control and manage the work-flow of a contact center. A multi-channel contact center ACD offers skills based routing and queue prioritization for phone calls, emails, and web channels. The real-time queue metrics are a good indicator of the contact center activities. Even with work-force  management (WFM) software predictions, it is not always possible to staff adequately for handling sudden spurts in call volumes. Organizations should have procedures in place to handle such events. One such option is having supervisory staff and supplementary employees participate in call handling if required.

Key queue metrics like the total number of calls waiting in a given queue, the wait time, the abandon rate, and the overall service level provide a measure of  real-time call center activities. A good contact center software will allow call center managers to set conditions based on the  queue metrics to trigger audio alerts. Different audible alerts can be set, each specific to a particular queue metrics parameter.

Q-Suite for Asterisk is a powerful contact center ACD offering such feature as a part of its call center software. It is a multi-tenant software for setting up Cloud based fault tolerant High Availability (HA) contact center solutions. Its audible notifications can be triggered by setting conditions on queue parameters that are monitored as a part of the real-time contact center reporting. These notifications allow the contact center floor operations to initiate procedures that are put in place for handling sudden spurt in call volumes.

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Contact Center ACD interface through Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI)

Large contact center installations with many concurrent users will scale to multiple Asterisk servers. This is the norm when building out a multi-tenant contact center or PBX roll out. With the growing popularity of Asterisk, it is being adopted for special mission critical applications with large concurrent users. In all such applications, the call center ACD plays a vital roll in managing queues and users. It routes the calls in the queues to the appropriate user console based on skills based routing and queue prioritization.

For more dynamic applications, the console application would want to have the real-time status information of all the calls in the queues. This data provides an opportunity to build additional powerful logic in the user consoles to better manage the calls. Such user consoles for customer service representatives and supervisors can empower them to intervene and handle calls based on the business rules of the organization.

A contact center ACD will manage multiple Asterisk telephony servers in a cluster through the Asterisk Manager Interface. Console applications can have continuous feed of the dynamic channel status information from all the incoming and outgoing calls handled by the call center ACD, by incorporating a listener in the console software. With adequate filters, this listener can be tuned to feed data to a versatile call handling logic, taking advantage of the real-time state information of all the channels, queues and users of the call center software.

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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.