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Handle More Calls With Asterisk, But Only If You’re Careful

You always want to get the most out of your investment. Push the limits of what your server can do to get the most out of it. Asterisk gives you a great way to get a lot of calls through a single server, but sometimes people wonder why they’re hitting a limit that’s lower than others get. Sometimes it’s just a matter of bandwidth. Sometimes it’s inefficient codec usage. Overuse of an application with a flaw (such as MeetMe) can cause performance issues. Very often, it’s the Asterisk call recordings that are to blame. If you’re very, very careful, there are ways to do better with your recordings. If you’re not careful, disaster and disarray await. Continue reading “Handle More Calls With Asterisk, But Only If You’re Careful”

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The Coffee Achiever

A lot of ink has been spilled over the years about our kettle. It’s a hard worker. However, the real MVP of our office has never been revealed, until now:

A big reason for our productivity
Our best hire ever is on the left.

Let’s call him Tim. With only a bit of regular maintenance, Tim produces pot after pot of coffee everyday. The boost to our productivity cannot be measured. Who knows how many hours of productivity could have been lost over the years if Tim was not on the job, ready to produce a fresh pot of coffee in only minutes.

It’s a testament to the power of the coffee pot that when our old coffee maker broke a few years ago, almost a dozen employees went to the nearest Tim Hortons to procure a coffee maker. (They also needed to buy coffee). Our first Tim Hortons coffee maker died within a couple of years. It was so popular, however, that it was quickly replaced with the same model.

Are there better coffee makers on the market? Maybe. We don’t care, though. Tim is firmly part of the team, and would be very difficult to replace.

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Why Are There So Many Options? A Few Tips for Creating Effective IVRs for Your Contact Center ACD

Have you ever gone to a restaurant, taken a seat, picked up the menu, and realized that the menu was a gargantuan mess of options? It’s an overwhelming feeling and makes it incredibly hard to decide on what you actually want to order. I’ve run into some awfully complicated IVRs in my contact center ACD experience, and not only are they a headache to troubleshoot, but when it comes to testing and navigating through the IVR, it’s quite annoying to have to spend all the time it takes to trial every option. If you can keep your IVR clear and concise, your customers and your support team will be thankful. Here are a few tips. Continue reading “Why Are There So Many Options? A Few Tips for Creating Effective IVRs for Your Contact Center ACD”

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Four Keys to Getting Accurate Dispositions

The right technology to get the correct call disposition

Some agents are meticulous about choosing the right disposition code for a call. Some aren’t so choosy, and will click the first thing that lets them finish the call. Assuming you have a way to train those latter agents, you do want to make it easier for the former agents to pick the right disposition without having to spend too much time focussing on the options. Continue reading “Four Keys to Getting Accurate Dispositions”

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Windows 10 Upgrade Completed! Three Major Reasons to Upgrade Your Contact Center

I upgraded my work laptop this week using the Windows 10 app from Microsoft. I haven’t used it much yet, so I cannot comment one way or the other on whether or not I consider it to be an actual upgrade from Windows 7 (I completely avoided Windows 8), but time will tell. Speaking of upgrades, here are three major reasons why you should work with your contact center ACD vendor to upgrade your software. Continue reading “Windows 10 Upgrade Completed! Three Major Reasons to Upgrade Your Contact Center”

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Spec Out Your Infrastructure Properly

Sometimes you see businesses overspend for one part of their infrastructure, leaving the rest to suffer. Sometimes the importance of a particular component isn’t recognized until it’s too late. We’ve seen it happen over and over again. I’m here today to tell you that your agent desktops are important. Scrimping too much there can leave your agents waiting around and inefficient. Continue reading “Spec Out Your Infrastructure Properly”

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Mixing Your Recordings Your Way With Asterisk

Quality Assurance with Asterisk AudioUsing the Asterisk Monitor application is a great way to record your calls. Sometimes, though, you have specific requirements for how the recordings are mixed, processed, or otherwise handled. Asterisk does give you a way to do this. An example that came up recently was that the Q/A department needed to be able to distinguish the two sides of the call. By default, Monitor records both the inbound and outbound audio, then mixes the two channels together into a mono recording. If the caller and call center agent had similar voices, this was tough to do. If there were audio or voice problems, it would be hard to tell which side was having the issue. They were looking for a way to have their call center software for Asterisk do this. Continue reading “Mixing Your Recordings Your Way With Asterisk”

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Building A Scalable Contact Center ACD on Asterisk

Scale your contact center acd, even on Asterisk

When Asterisk came along, it was exactly the sort of thing many were looking for. Telephony had been the purview of the giants like Mitel and Nortel. If you wanted a telephone system, you had to pay a lot for a fixed set of functionality. Asterisk gave similar functionality on commodity hardware and much cheaper telephony hardware developed by Digium. Continue reading “Building A Scalable Contact Center ACD on Asterisk”