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VoIP – Bandwidth, Codec and Voice Quality

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) has established itself as a dominant force in telecommunications. SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is the application layer for creating and controlling the calls and the voice is governed by RTP (Real Time Transport). When we are setting up a contact center or converting to VoIP, we want to know how to take advantage of the VoIP without getting into the pit falls of the technology.

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Practical limits on predictive dialing algorithm

Last updated: August 12, 2016

Predictive dialing is used by outbound contact centers to improve the talk-time of their agents. A good predictive dialer algorithm will pace its dialing based on the hit-rate and the number of agents waiting to receive calls. Hit rate is the percentage of live connects versus call attempts. The dial rate of a predictive dialer is limited by the drop rate allowed in the country of operation. For instance, the FTC in the United States limits the drop rate to 3%. Drop rate is the ratio of calls dropped to the total calls answered by a person at the other end. Any call that goes off-hook (picked up by a live person) needs to be connected to an agent within 2 seconds, or it’s counted as a drop.

Predictive dialing is more complicated than call progress analysis. The biggest factor in call progress detection is the no-answer duration. Typically for United States or Canada, it is at least 18 seconds. That’s roughly three rings on a phone. A good call progress algorithm estimates if the call will be answered or if it will be a no-answer. With digital signaling available for both TDM and VoIP, all other types of call terminations, such as busy, bad number, and disconnected, are known instantly. A predictive dialer algorithm has to be smarter than statistical call progress analysis. It has to keep the average wait time of agents between  calls to a minimum without exceeding the drop-rate set by regulatory authorities.
There are also other challenges for predictive dialers. When the outbound dialing market gets saturated, it results in poor hit-rate. The dialer cannot just increase its dial rate to compensate for the poor hit rate. There are unwritten rules in the telecommunication industry limiting the number of call setup per second. Too many call attempts will result in telecom carriers throttling call setups by signaling network congestion. In scenarios where the dialer is already dialing at the rate of allowable call setups per second, there is little value for any statistical call progress analysis on calls in progress.

There is also a trend in using warm leads to increase hit-rate. Here there are fewer leads, so the predictive dialer needs to be very efficient. With warm leads, agents are talking longer and the dialer needs to work well for the smaller number of agents waiting for live connects.

With years of production experience, Q-Suite has a predictive dialer that is finely tuned to pace well and perform effectively. We introduced our call center solution for Asterisk in 2003 and have been improving it ever since.

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Skype for Asterisk, another wonderful development for Asterisk users

In 2003, when Indosoft started migrating its call center software to Asterisk, we knew it was the right move because we had switched over to Linux in 1999 and seen its benefits. We were not quite sure of the magnitude of change unleashed by Asterisk and its impact on the PBX market. After all, we were selling contact center solutions and were looking to get more control of the costs associated with development and support. When we look at Asterisk, it is from this narrow perspective of call center requirements even though we realize that Asterisk serves a very large community with a broader range of requirements.

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Mitigating risks while deploying contact center solutions

Contact centers are situated everywhere around the Globe and words like BPO and back-office a permanent part of our vocabulary. In 2000, I remember us taking more than a month to install and cut-over a call center solution for a 60 seat contact center. We were unique in one sense, we had switched over to Linux and could do lot things remote. Today it is a completely different world and we almost all of our contact center installations, remote, whether it be Nigeria, Botswana or Europe. We can install a full feature call center software and solution in 2 days once the hardware and infrastructure ready and the network access and bandwidth are made available. The operating system install with flavors like Ubuntu make it so easy that we don’t think about the complexities too much. The telecommunication infrastructure has become extremely versatile and complicated at the same time. You may have agents sitting in Philippines, infrastructure in U.S.A. or Europe and handling calls for various geographic domains.

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.NET library integrates Call Center Software for Asterisk with Native Windows Client

As we call know, Microsoft Windows dominates the desktop world. When we built our call center software for Asterisk on Linux, we initially settled on Mozilla Firefox as the standard web browser for interface. As our product gained market acceptance, we realized that there were a lot of application written in native windows environment which are used within the realm of a call center application. We always had a socket interface API to our call center software Q-suite which we were able to wrap within an OCX interface. As a natural progression, we now have a .NET API to the call center software which is a ideal fit for the native Windows clients.

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Yeah, everybody uses Asterisk for call centers, now!

Indosoft has been in the business of selling CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) and call center software for 9 years. I have been handling all sales related inquiries and technical demos. for most of the period. I was astonished when one of my inquiries (and future client made this comment) “Yeah, everybody uses Asterisk for call centers, now”. He runs a Microsoft shop and is extremely technically savvy and when he started the conversation, I was expecting him to give me a third degree once he realized that the Indosoft call center software Q-Suite runs on top of Asterisk PBX.

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