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Managing your call center software technology stack

The economic impact of Linux and Asterisk are immeasurable. Contact center software built to run on top of this powerful technology stack can offer a greatly superior platform at considerable cost savings. Technology managers are starting to realize the benefits of Asterisk, a powerful hybrid PBX that can also serve as a media server and a protocol gateway. This VoIP switch runs on Linux, the dominant server operating system. For many years now, Linux has dispensed away the need for endless licensing costs enforced by the proprietary operating system software of the earlier decade.

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Asterisk in Federated Contact Center Deployments

Asterisk, from its humble beginning in 1999, has evolved into a strong telephony platform, due to the contribution from thousands of volunteer software and telecommunication experts worldwide. Today, Asterisk is a proven, open source, next-generation telephone switch, that has been tested and implemented by millions of users. It has been successfully used to migrate out of thousands of legacy proprietary telephone switches. Continue reading “Asterisk in Federated Contact Center Deployments”

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ACD Inter-Operability with PBX switches simplifies remote and at-home agent setup

In many organizational setup, phone system is in place well before anything else. If a decision is made later to add customer service or support operations internally, it involves setting a full function contact center ACD.  This ACD will handle among other things, all the IVR (Interactive Voice Response), Queues, Skills based Routing, time of the day scheduling and associated call center activities for the planned customer service or support. Once an enterprise level call center software is identified based on functionality, its inter-operability with the existing office PBX will determine if the call center agents can also be a part of the same extension schema for uniformity within the organization.

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Integrating Chat, Email and Twitter into ACD with Skills based Routing

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) has evolved to provide an efficient mechanism for routing and distributing incoming phone calls to the right agent in a timely manner and increase the productivity of the contact center. A sophisticated Call Center ACD offers Skills based Routing where calls are routed into separate queues based on the number dialed by the caller or the options selected through an IVR interaction after the call lands in the phone system.

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Visual Tool for Building Multi-level IVRs in Asterisk-based Contact Centers

Visual Call Flow Builder

Every manufacturer has its own unique mechanism to handle human and outside interactions with the telephone switch. In most legacy systems the options are limited, restrictive and cumbersome. The advent of Asterisk changed all this with its “Dialplan”.  It is tool and mechanism within Asterisk with a command language that unleashes unbelievable power and flexibility. Every Dialplan created is a set of instructions to handle inbound calls and outbound dials that come in and go out of this incredible next generation phone switch. Continue reading “Visual Tool for Building Multi-level IVRs in Asterisk-based Contact Centers”

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Visual Tool for Building Sophisticated IVR

In an inbound contact center, calls coming into every DID (or DDI as it is referred in Europe) will typically flow through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) into the ACD for call routing and distribution. A visual tool greatly simplifies the task of building this IVR especially if it is a sophisticated multi-level IVR.

Asterisk, the a game changing hybrid PBX, comes with a customizable Diaplan that allows control over all facets of inbound and outbound calling. Dialplan, an important functional component within Asterisk, offers an internal mechanism and tool  to introduce, modify and control call-flow through it rich syntax.

Call center solutions for Asterisk will require a full-function ACD to provide essential features like skills based routing, queue prioritization, queue callback, supervisor dashboards, real-time and historical reporting. Larger contact center ACD additionally scale to multiple Asterisk servers in a cluster to handle the maximum concurrent call volume. In this call-flow, the calls will go through an IVR to flow into the different queues of the ACD for skills based routing.

Q-Suite offers a  visual tool for the customers to develop effective and powerful Interactive Voice Response systems. Its Visual Diaplan Builder comes with a large library of functions within an intuitive GUI tool to build call-flows for effective call handling and distribution. This includes the functionality available from the Asterisk Dialaplan as well as the rich call distribution functionality of the ACD. It can be further enhanced with libraries for TTS (Text to Speech) and ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition).

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Web Callback within Multi-Channel ACD

Company web-sites provide a unique opportunity to gather expression of interest or inquiries and channel it directly to the sales and marketing operations. This is an excellent source for warm prospects and should be accorded higher priority than the outbound campaign sales operations. In a multi-channel contact center with ACD and Dialer, Web callbacks are unique. Even though they will result in outbound calls, they can be prioritized and channeled through both list based based dialing as well as Skills based Routing to the most appropriated available agent for an immediate callback.

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Chat management through ACD Skills Based Routing

Chat as a communication means is not as synchronous as a voice call. The responsiveness of an individual wanting to engage in a chat cannot be controlled. This introduces challenges in efficiency of operation while integrating Chat into the distribution scheme of a Contact Center ACD. In a multi-channel environment within the contact center, Chat can be treated on par with telephone inquiries. This makes Chat an equally expensive channel to man and run in comparison to web self-service options.

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SIP Proxy with Load Balancing for Contact Centers deploying Asterisk Clusters

 

In larger installations with high concurrent call volume, the contact center ACD manages and controls multiple Asterisk servers in a cluster. Since call volume at any given instant can exceed the capacity of a single Asterisk server, a SIP proxy will serve to distribute calls evenly with load balancing.  The ACD maintains the sequence and order of calls coming to the individual queues, irrespective of the Asterisk servers into which the calls come in. It will route and distribute calls to the available agents based on skills based routing, irrespective of where their phones are registered to. Sophisticated call center solutions offer greater flexibility allowing agents to use any external phone like home land-line phone or a mobile phone or a phone behind another PBX. This is ideal for remote and work-at-home options.

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