A dichotomy we have observed with the Q-Suite, but one that is certainly not limited to our clients, is that for any complex feature we introduce some clients will ignore (or at least use it to the minimum and never touch it again), while others spend man-months of effort pushing the limits of capability to leverage it to the maximum. Continue reading “Migrating Tenant Components in Q-Suite 6”
Smooth and Flexible Script Building for Call Center ACD using TinyMCE
Script building can be a long, cumbersome, tedious process for contact center ACD administrators. While some agent scripts might be limited to a few pages with only a few components per page, other scripts may be dozens of pages with dozens of components contained within each page. As the length of the script grows and the number of components increases, the person responsible for building the scripts may begin to lose interest, which could lead to errors in the script, causing an increase in the troubleshooting and validation periods for any type of QA that may be performed prior to rolling out a campaign into production. With the integration of TinyMCE into the Q-Suite’s powerful script builder, the monotony of the script building process should be vastly alleviated. Continue reading “Smooth and Flexible Script Building for Call Center ACD using TinyMCE”
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:
- 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.
- 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.
Monthly Licensing Allows Flexibility on a Budget
When Indosoft first entered the telephony world, near the turn of the century, most of our deployments were small. Two-server predictive dialer or Do Not Call blockers ruled the day, and usually involved a lot of work to get integrated with the call center. As a result, we had an inflexible pricing and payment policy, with the costs coming upfront. Since those days, the IT and telephony world have undergone a dramatic change, as has our product line. Over the last year Indosoft has experimented with monthly per-port pricing. This option has been a hit with our clients, and is more frequently expected by new clients. The widespread acceptance of on-demand pricing for hardware has led a push for on-demand pricing in other categories, and the software that runs on those servers is an ideal candidate. Continue reading “Monthly Licensing Allows Flexibility on a Budget”
Realtime Workforce Assignment for Contact Center ACD
When operating an inbound ACD contact center, it is quite often the goal of the center to minimize the amount of calls that fall outside of the specified service level agreements for their queues. Clients may lose faith in the center’s ability to handle the expected call volumes if these numbers are too high. Abandoned calls are not a desirable outcome either, as those calls get aborted in the IVR and never had the chance to get routed to an available CSR. In this situation, it is vital for managers to be able to reallocate CSRs to the appropriate queues. Continue reading “Realtime Workforce Assignment for Contact Center ACD”
Large Call Centers Migrating to Asterisk
Deciding whether to migrate a large call center away from a TDM-based PBX to VoIP-based Asterisk can be difficult. Any site wishing to do that would need to decide whether to go it alone, or use an existing contact center solution. Using an existing solution may cost more upfront, but you’ll have the advantage of not having to develop all the screens and reports yourself.
Cloud Offerings Simplify Call Center Deployment
One of the reasons Asterisk has taken such a large share of the telephony market is the ease of deploying it on commodity hardware with free, Open Source operating systems. Commoditizing hardware and simplifying its deployment has been a key factor in the widespread adoption of the Cloud as a business concept. This makes the Cloud an ideal target for deployment of Asterisk-based contact center software. However, requirements such as long-term storage of recordings or data have complicated the picture. Once again, the Cloud offers a solution. Services such as Amazon S3 provide a widely-available interface for the long-term storage of recordings while providing easy access when required. Amazon RDS, their database offering, puts the headache of tuning and configuring the database server back in the hands of Amazon. Continue reading “Cloud Offerings Simplify Call Center Deployment”
The Differences in Call Survival and Call Recovery
While investigating High Availability (HA) in CTI and PBX systems you will often find mention of Call Recovery. Another term you run into is Call Survival, which is often used interchangeably with Call Recovery incorrectly. This is because each is a different approach to solving a problem. The problem being a failure which would interrupt the calls of a system.
With Call Survival when a failure happens the caller and callee do not have to take action to continue their call as it survives the failure. At a high level this is done by reacting to the failure quickly and re-routing the audio path around the failure.
With Call Recovery when a failure happens the recovery is different depending on the system. Sometimes the caller will need to initiate the redial the callee or it could be an automated process but the callee still have to answer this new call.
From a user perspective the better option is Call Survival as they may only experience a momentary interruption in their audio as the path is rerouted around the failure instead of having to re-initiate a call to recovery it.
The Q-Suite platform supports Call Survival with the help of the Overseer Watchdog providing HA for other services in addition to being one part of the Call Survival solution.
Dynamic Script Switching for Customer Service Representatives
Here is a situation we have all encountered over the years. When dealing with service providers via their contact center ACD, whether it is a cable, internet, phone, or insurance company to name a few, we will offer our best description about our issue to the current customer service representative (CSR). Too many times we are presented with the outcome of needing to be transferred to someone else who can better handle this particular inquiry. Once on the line with the next CSR, we are then forced to reiterate the exact same scenario that we had explained to the first CSR. This is not how a caller wants to spend their time. Continue reading “Dynamic Script Switching for Customer Service Representatives”
Contact Center Software for Cloud Platform
There are two distinct approaches to setting up a Cloud platform for offering contact center services. The first approach is to use a multi-tenant contact center software to build a call center solution on a given infrastructure. The second approach is to virtualize the underlying infrastructure and replicate the Contact Center ACD in each instance. The difference in the two approaches is the level at which abstraction is introduced. Cloud contact center solution does not necessarily mean multi-tenant or virtualization. When a service provider looks at building a Cloud platform to offer contact center solution as a service, these are the two available options.
Virtualization provides the ability to run multiple instances of the operating system co-existing on a shared hardware. This abstracts the underlying resources and the service provider manages multiple instances of contact centers providing dedicated instance for every customer. This approach brings out the benefit of Cloud delivery of service and centralizes the management of the infrastructure. It does not increase the operational efficiency at the Call Center ACD level. This is often the case when service providers virtualize Asterisk to offer Cloud based services.
A multi-tenant contact center software provides the ability to run multiple tenants using the same multi-channel ACD. Here the abstraction is at the contact center software layer, allowing the Cloud platform service provider to run one instance of the multi-channel ACD to deliver contact center solution to multiple, distinct, and separate contact centers. This is preferred to a virtual contact center solution as it brings about greater operational efficiency with less management overheads. There are powerful contact center solutions that support multi-tenant operation at the contact center ACD level with great degee of sophistication. Such solutions scale by increasing the capacity of the system without creating additional virtual instances to manage.