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Integrating Phone, Email and Trouble-ticket support through Multi-Channel ACD

Providing good support to existing customers for your products or services will preserve customer loyalty and generate long term support revenue. This is especially true with software and information technology products and services. In the global market place, phone, email and web based support are the norm for offering customer service but they consume significant resources. With so much emphasis on sales, a lot of programs are offered to push sales, resulting in large volumes of customer inquiry. It is useful to look at how phone, email and web inquiries are organized before presenting them to a multi-channel call center software for routing.

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Visual call flow designer for Asterisk based contact centers

Call flow represents the service work flow offered to an incoming call through the voice portal of a contact center solution. A clean and effective call flow improves efficiency and enhances customer service. Incorporating Interactive Voice Responses (IVR) within a call flow provides an opportunity for integrating information from the back-end systems to enable more self service options . The IVR also introduces call flow automation to reduce wait-time and empower the customer. Based on interactive customer responses, call routing decisions are made from the IVR,

A Visual designer is a drag and drop  tool-set for visual call flow modeling with graphical icons representing the IVR and contact center ACD functions. In Asterisk based contact center center solutions, the call flow designer will include a powerful set of telephony and scripting functions, intrinsic to Asterisk Dialplans. Multi-tenant contact center solutions in cloud deployments scale over multiple Asterisk servers. The contact center software controlling the Asterisk cluster through its call center ACD, will deploy the output of the visual call flow designer across all the Asterisk servers. The capabilities of the call center ACD determine the extent of sophistication available in a particular call center solution.

The expanding user base of Asterisk in contact centers, due to its fast evolution, lower costs of acquisition, and superior telephony, have generated a great demand for powerful, dynamic, and visual, modeling tool for building calls Flow and IVR. Contact center software like Q-Suite come with an intuitive graphical visual dialplan builder to create and deploy powerful IVR driven call flow applications.

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Visual Call Flow Designer

Call flow management influences the efficiency of service delivery through the voice portal of an inbound contact center. Interactive Voice Responses (IVR) are an important sub-set that open up opportunity for self-service and automation within an multi-channel contact center center operation. A visual call flow designer is a graphical tool to build work-flows for interaction with the caller, perform automated tasks, make decisions on branching based on customer input, and dictate the routing. A sophisticated contact center software will include a call flow building tool with a web Graphical User Interface (GUI) designer capable of drag and drop flow management with revision control.

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Indosoft contact center software development evolution

As one of the early pioneers migrating our call center solution to Asterisk telephony, Indosoft sensed a shift in the market sentiment due to the gaining popularity of open source Linux. VoIP was still in its infancy in 2003 and only the very courageous were willing to venture into it for production systems. During the last decade, fast paced evolution of technology in many frontiers has worked in our favor, especially since we opted to build a contact center software from the ground up, for use with Asterisk. We also embarked on a multi-tenant software while sticking to the popular technology stack consisting of Asterisk, Linux, Apache and MySQL. Today, in the tenth year, Q-Suite 5.8  is a mature, multi-tenant,  Asterisk based call center software with high availability and fail-over. It caters to small, medium and large cloud driven installations scaling seamlessly with the growth requirements.

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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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Contact center work-flow changes due to CRM use

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become vital to marketing. Most organizations have a similar process in converting leads to sales even though their businesses are varied. A CRM software provides insight into the progress of the leads from the time they were generated as a contact record, through their life-cycle, till they reach fruition. Along the way, contact centers are used to increase the effectiveness of reaching out and communicating with current and future customers.

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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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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.

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Multi-channel ACD in a Cloud setup

Cloud is the new frontier for voice telephony and the contact center ACD (Automatic Call Distribution). The convergence of the transport mechanism for Voice with Data through Internet Protocol (IP), the acceptance of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the default standard for Voice over IP (VoIP) transmission, and the consolidation of infrastructure accessible through Internet, have created a favorable environment for the growth of ‘Cloud’ based contact services.

Depending on the size and scale of a contact center operation, there are some options on how best to migrate to the Cloud. The larger operations can move to managed services in a Cloud platform where they exercise control over the operation without actually owning all the infrastructure. The smaller operations can be a part of a multi-tenant installation that is segmented and partitioned to provide an exclusive setup. Both these options provide a number of advantages including lower cost of setup and operation as well as the ability to have a geographic distributed work-force.

A multi-channel ACD handles more than voice. The additional channels may handle Chat. Email, and Social media. The ACD serves to distribute the conversations based on skills based routing but the media in the individual channels are handled by the respective media server. In the case of voice communications, the media server is the PBX switch. Asterisk dominates this category as a hybrid PBX which works seamlessly with both VoIP and the traditional Time Division Multiplexing (TDM).

The underlying technology stack for setting up multi-channel contact center ACD does not differ very much between a premise installation or a data center installation in the Cloud. With a competent hosted service provider to offer managed services, this can dramatically reduce the associated Information Technology (IT) operational cost. Also, sites with good connectivity offer the ability to have geographically distributed and remote agents. Some contact center software are multi-tenant by design and this enables the hosted service provider to offer shared IT resources for its tenants, thereby lowering the overall operational cost.