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ACD – A PBX feature or a Call Center Application?

The demarcation has blurred in the last decade. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) has a very broad definition now. Traditional phone switches (PBX) which provide phone extensions and connectivity to Telco, offer all the normal functionalities for call handling including Auto-attendant, Direct inward dialing, Find-me follow-me and voice-mail. Call center ACD handles Agents (as opposed to plain extensions), detailed IVR (interactive Voice Response) and Queues. The degree of sophistication within the PBX as well as call center ACD applications have evolved considerably. Automatic call distribution (ACD) is not limited simple call distribution, but an opportunity to created clever mechanisms to enrich interactions with the callers. Cost-effectiveness and increase in productivity are the key factors driving businesses to incorporate sophisticated ACD.

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Feature-rich call center ACD to go with Asterisk

Asterisk has set a very high benchmark for VoIP PBX systems. Its powerful and flexible structure has enabled enterprises all over the world to migrate to IP while keeping conventional TDM interface wherever necessary. It is a common knowledge that Asterisk  is used as a VoIP engine in many commercial products. It does not make economic sense to have an in-house development team to develop, manage and keep up with the prolific pace of open source VoIP PBX switches like Asterisk or FreeSWITCH. Therefore, many organizations are looking at Asterisk as a platform to migrate their legacy products to IP telephony. Digium offers Asterisk support through commercial licensing agreements. This provides organization with considerable flexibility without the cost of maintaining large development teams.

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Flexibility within a Call center ACD with Agent seating and ON-Hook/OFF-Hook telephony

Large enterprise contact centers require their ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) to be flexible. The primary objective of a call center ACD is to manage routing and handling all incoming calls resulting in appropriate calls being connected to the most suitable agent. Hot desking is the flexibility available for agent seating within a call center. On-hook and Off-hook describe the state of the agent telephone device. An On-hook agent phone has to ring to incoming call, like regular phones. An off-hook agent is already connected and would hear an audible beep before a new call is handed out.

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Scalability of Asterisk for larger ACD deployments

Back in late 2002, when we looked at Asterisk as a possible alternative to CTI platforms based on boards from Dialogic and Pika, the very thought of working with open source telephony was exciting.  The possibilities seemed endless and we had limited ability to analyse possible shortcomings moving forward. In mid 1990s the processor speeds in x86 systems made it impossible to conceive voice processing on anything without on-board DSP. The concept of using motherboard CPU for voice processing did cause apprehension but it was counter balanced by the cost savings. With the talk of SIP and IP telephony  as the emerging protocol for voice communication, Asterisk offered a lot of promise. Today we see Asterisk deployments everywhere with limitless applications. With VoIP well entrenched, Asterisk and open source telephony has demonstrated the usefulness and versatility of this hybrid PBX with seamless handling of VoIP and TDM.

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CTI (Computer Telephony Interface) for Asterisk

Asterisk is a definite game changer in revolutionizing the world of computer telephony interface (CTI). When you are considering Asterisk as a hybrid PBX telephony switch for your contact center requirements, you may end up looking for an ACD that meets the requirements of your contact center. Often times you might already have a fully developed business application requiring CTI integration. Sophisticated ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) will allow the call center to handle incoming calls with greater efficiency and increased productivity. The general attributes of an ACD include,

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Call center migration to Asterisk

Migration to Asterisk is an attractive proposition and resisting it is futile. Let us look at this more critically.  TDM is gradually giving way to IP and VoIP is here to stay. Everyone will eventually look for a platform to migrate to VoIP. Call centers are no exceptions. Managing the risk of such a migration is critical. It is also important to grasp short comings of VoIP and Asterisk  as they grow and manage it properly. In return, the rewards of such a migration can be disproportionately large. Asterisk makes it easy to move into IP telephony without giving up TDM. The richness of its PBX will amaze anyone. Cost savings are enormous.

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Asterisk leadership in IP telephony for Call Centers

In 2003, Asterisk was emerging as a powerful open source PBX with VoIP capability. The availability of Zapata telephony TDM boards were critical to its deployment.  Back then, high density CTI boards with on-board DSP were the norm. Linux had earned grudgingly acceptance in the server world but CTI was still dominated by Windows based board manufacturers. The boards were good but the overall cost of managing a development team to keep up with the PBX feature-set was getting prohibitive.  VoIP was being mentioned and there was anxiety. Imagine having to maintain a software team to manage and enhance a PBX feature-set using the board manufacturer’s API and survive a paradigm shift. Having benefited from Linux greatly, when we heard of Asterisk, we were very eager to try it and adapt it for call center use.

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Call center ACD

Last updated: August 10, 2016

It is understood that ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) represents much more than what a typical PBX offers. It is used when the purpose of incoming calls is more than reaching a specific phone extension. Contact centers require highly evolved ACD to bring efficiency to their operations. Let us look at what we can expect an ACD to do:

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X-lite default setting hangs-up the phone if you are silent

Last updated: August 10, 2016

We have clients using our call center software Q-Suite with a variety of IP-phones and softphones. One of the popular softphones is X-lite and its licensed version eyeBeam. There are times when it takes considerable investigation of a problem to identify the cause. Recently we came across one which warrants a mention.We were investigating complaints about calls being dropped. Generally with VoIP and SIP, this raises all sorts of alarm and as always, we started a detailed investigation to determine cause of the connection drop between the softphone and the our contact center platform. Many of our customers are hosted multi-tenant contact center service providers and the usual suspect is the infrastructure. In this case, the debug log did not point to anything suspicious until we noticed a pattern of agents being silent before the the softphone sending a ‘BYE’. This was happening without any agent action. The SIP user-agent (X-lite) was hanging up. It did not take very long to determine the culprit within the X-lite settings. You have the screen-shot with the red arrow pointing to the checkbox.

X-lite seems to by default, check the ‘Call Inactivity’ check box and inflict considerable headache any to contact center technical staff who relies on default settings. We noticed it when the call center agents were waiting on one end listening to the interaction between their customer and an automated third party verification IVR. The more sophisticated the call center software suite, the more you will have to button down all the setting carefully. Silence suppression is an option not supported by Asterisk.

Other softphones have similar functionality. For instance, Zoiper phones appear to have a “Keep alive time-out” setting that defaults to on. Recent versions allow you to control that yourself under the “Advanced” tab of the Account options. Be sure to check out your particular brand of softphone for the same kind of settings.