Contact Center Software for Asterisk Telephony
Information for Asterisk based contact centers
Steve Jobs wasn’t the best software developer. He also wasn’t a world-class designer. But when he combined software with design, he created something world class. You may have a CRM, or agent interface, that you’ve invested a lot into. Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine it with call center technology to create something better? Continue reading “Take What You Do, Be Like Steve Jobs”
Our landlords have fallen to the vendor lock-in trap with the paper towel dispensers in the washrooms. The paper towel dispensers don’t use normal rolls of paper, they require a proprietary roll that has a plastic peg in the middle of the roll.
For some reason, they are unable to get that specific brand of paper towel and are now having to use an open solution: Continue reading “Vendor lock-in can happen to anyone, even with paper towels”
It’s a big weekend for movie fans. The first weekend in May unofficially begins the summer season for Hollywood blockbusters, and there’s never been an absolute lock for a tentpole like Avengers: Age of Ultron. After the first Avengers film completely shattered the record for the opening weekend take with a lofty $207M, the sequel is expected to surpass that. Quite incredible. Just as the Marvel universe needed to gather Earth’s mightiest heroes, you too will need to wrangle up the proper components for your contact center ACD. Let’s have a look. Continue reading “Avengers Assemble! Gathering the Pieces You Need for Your Contact Center ACD”
Callbacks can be a great way to give that last push to get your sale. Callbacks can also drain the performance (and profitability) of your call center. For such an important tool, they can be woefully misunderstood. Your call center software likely has a number of settings surrounding callbacks. Make sure you understand what your agents are doing with their callbacks.
There are two primary types of scheduled callbacks: Continue reading “Schedule the Sale”
Interesting fact: there is a 99% correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and margarine consumption in the US. I was reminded of that fact on Monday when we got a call from a client complaining about audio quality. His question was whether pulling his weekly report was causing the issue.
Continue reading “Why Your Best Guess Is Probably Wrong”
“Moving at the speed of business” is a cute slogan, but if you’re trying to get your venture off the ground quickly, that may be too slow. You’ve got dozens of things you’re trying to get going at the same time, and you can’t wait. Odds are you’re using the Cloud for a large part of your infrastructure. Your customer service line shouldn’t be any different.
Continue reading “The Startup Call Center – Be Nimble, Be Quick”
A situation came up this week where we needed to collaborate with a server colocation in order to rebuild a server. Overall, the process was very smooth and went by without much of a hitch. However, not having full physical access to the server definitely slowed us up a bit. Here’s why:
There is a subset of your staff doing most of the work. This is the well-known Pareto Principle, where 80% of results are achieved by 20% of causes. 20% of your employees are doing 80% of the work. 20% of your clients are responsible for 80% of your profits. Understanding how this works in your cloud-based call center can help you be more efficient. Having 20% of your telephony servers handling 80% of the calls can be a recipe for disaster.
You may have one number that comes in on one trunk, and use smart IVR routing to get calls to the right spot. That’s pretty common. Your SIP provider may only allow one IP to communicate with it. That’s also pretty common. If you just point it to the first of many telephony servers, though, that server is going to be doing a lot of work. One strategy is to have agents distributed across multiple servers to spread things out. Another is to have multiple trunks. None of these solutions is ideal for heavy usage cases. On commodity or Cloud hardware, you will reach the capacity of a server, and be stuck. It’s worse if you have occasional bursts of activity over one trunk or another.
Load balancing is very important under heavy call volumes. For telephony, this is usually accomplished by having a load-balancing SIP Proxy in front of your telephony servers. Handling the media (voice, usually) is the hard part of a Voice over IP (VoIP) call. Signalling is fairly lightweight. Telling the server a call is coming in, accepting it, saying “Yes, I’m still here” is really just some text being passed back and forth. Taking the audio, encoding it, breaking it into packets and sending it off, possibly recording it, is the hard part.
One interesting fact about most VoIP traffic, such as SIP, is the signalling and media can happen on different servers. In the case where only one server is allowed to connect to the provider, this almost always means the signalling. The media can, and often does, connect to a different server.
On inbound, a SIP proxy handles the easy part. It can also decide which of the available servers will take the next call, and arrange the details between your server and your service provider. This way, there’s not one single server in a multi-server call center that’s struggling with 80% of the call volume.
For outbound, the usual solution is to have your trunk proxied, and the outbound load distributed evenly. This usually means spreading your agents out so the outbound call volume doesn’t overwhelm the server. Again, your SIP proxy looks like the trunk provider to each of the servers using the proxy. The call gets dialed, then the media is processed as normal.
In either case, whether inbound or outbound, you can avoid having the Pareto Principle cause disruption. The better you do with call distribution, the fewer complaints you’ll have with call problems.
Crunch time is coming. You can prepare for it and sail through it, or you can let it overwhelm you and lose the respect of your clients. Some call centers handle crunch time poorly, no matter how far in advance it’s known. April 15 comes at the same time each year, after all. So does Christmas, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day weekend, Labour Day, the end of the year. Continue reading “Crunch Time is Coming”
If you have one public toll free number you advertise broadly, you may have a problem. It’s something we’ve seen several times in the past. Giving the client one number to call solves their problem of deciding which number to call you at. The problem of taking that call and getting it to the right place now becomes yours. If you only ever have one type of call, then you can probably figure it out pretty quickly. Otherwise, you’re going to need help from your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) builder. Continue reading “One Number, One Big Problem”