Contact Center Software for Asterisk Telephony
Information for Asterisk based contact centers
Someone was having trouble monitoring agents. Supervisors couldn’t listen to their agents. It was a simple issue to fix, and the tech logged in to make sure that listening to live calls worked. Let’s call this tech Bill.
The first agent Bill attached to was not in a live call. She engaged in chit-chat with someone nearby. A beep played, indicating a connected call. The agent went silent.
What???
Continue reading “Monitoring Agents: Are Your Agents Performing? Are They Even Trying To?”
Have you ever gotten a call from a call center, then gotten another call from the same number 5 minutes later? Maybe you were screening your calls, or you saw the caller ID come in while you were on the other line. Anyway, super annoying. Chances are that you weren’t too happy. Did their call center software break? Did they have you in their list multiple times? Or are they straight up incompetent? It doesn’t matter. They upset you. Continue reading “Are You Recycling Your Leads Correctly?”
If preview dialing is slow and methodical, and predictive dialing is dialing on steroids, you have to wonder how to characterize auto dialing.
To be clear, here we’re discussing auto dialing that doesn’t involve predictive dialing. That’s a special case of an auto dialer that attempts to connect agents to calls as soon as possible. There are cases where you don’t want to involve an agent, or only in certain cases. You may need an auto dialer.
An auto dialer is usually used in three cases:
Continue reading “Rise of the Robots – Outbound Dialing Part 5”
If your goal is to keep your call center as busy as possible, and you have plenty of leads, lines and agents, then predictive dialing may be right for you. Many people confuse predictive dialing with power dialing, but they are different. Power dialing is usually the straightforward dialing of X number of calls for every agent currently waiting for a call. It’s an unsophisticated approach that’s easy to implement, so it is widely available.
Continue reading “The Power of Prediction – Outbound Dialing Part 3: Predictive Dialing”
You can have a great dialer, a wonderful staff, and effective management, but if your lead queuing strategy is wrong, your outbound campaign is going to fail. Great agents can’t sell to people who aren’t home. The best product for working couples isn’t likely to be sold from 9-5. Your restaurant supply company isn’t going to close any sales between 11am and 1pm local time, when the restaurants in question are struggling to handle the lunch crowd. Continue reading “Five Keys To Dialing Your Leads Effectively”
Are your outbound agents spending most of their time talking to clients, or each other? If you’re not using the right mode of dialing for your campaign, it could be the former. When you have an outbound dialing campaign, the agent talk rate is going to be a big factor in its effectiveness. The more time agents spend talking to clients, the better. You need to have a good understanding of the options available, and when each may be most effective. Continue reading “Outbound Dialing Part 1: Profit from the Four Ps of Outbound Dialing”
Answering Machine Detection (AMD) is something that interests everyone running a predictive dialer or other automatic dialing. As discussed previously, the changing world of outbound dialing and telephony leaves call center software users looking for ways to wring additional efficiencies from their lead lists and call floors, and AMD appears to be one of those ways. Continue reading “Tradeoffs with Answering Machine Detection on Asterisk”
Outbound dialing in the call center has undergone a revolutionary change in the past decade. In October of 2004, the Supreme Court of the United States allowed a ruling from a lower court to stand that enabled the FTC Do Not Call regulations. The widespread registration of home phones, along with restrictions on dialing cellphones (and their increasing share of the number of phones outstanding), signaled a massive shift in the way outbound contact centers would operate. Automatic or predictive dialing was not killed off then, but it has been in critical condition since. Continue reading “Warm Leads and Outbound Dialing in Today’s Environment”
Settling on Asterisk as the telephony platform for call centers is a no brainer. It is by far the most flexible and powerful PBX available and is supported by Digium and the open source community at large. Its features are so overwhelming that spending top dollars to acquire any other telephony platform with limitations is not the way forward. Continue reading “Architect your Asterisk based multi-site call centers”