Information for Asterisk based contact centers
I was on the receiving end of a fairly vicious cold this week and I think I’ve almost got it beat. Let us hope! Winter can also go away as well.
This got me thinking about some of the most commons reasons why your call center ACD may be sick, or just behaving poorly. Here are a few big ones. Continue reading “Call Center ACDs and the Common Cold”
Thousands of volunteer experts have worked on Asterisk since 1999. This has made it into a powerhouse platform for telephony that you can use in your own system. Today it is a proven technology used by millions of users. Call centers and major PBX users are abandoning their legacy proprietary telephone switches to get the benefits offered by this Open-Source system. Continue reading “Thousands helping Millions, Helping Your Federated Call Center Deployment”
“The dialplan isn’t working!” Four words that increase your stress without telling you anything useful. In the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve heard it a couple of times. Both times it was the same cause, so I thought I’d tell you about it.
You can’t leave people hanging in an IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Silence is bad practice in writing dialplans, just like it’s bad in radio. But, it’s easy to miss some of the points where silence gets introduced. Continue reading “One Big Mistake You May Be Making With Your IVR”
I have a scenario approaching quickly with regards to this topic. My previous two vehicles were leased. My third was financed, with the end date of the loan coming up, which means no more direct vehicle payments. This end goal was very appealing to me, hence the purchasing of the most recent vehicle as opposed to leasing it. Maintenance costs are going to crop up, but those are unavoidable. I did truly like the convenience of having a leased car, mostly because if anything at all went awry in the lifetime of the lease, the dealer covered almost any and all expenses. This is not the case with owning of course. This leads me to the actual topic here: Should I lease my contact center or should I buy it?
Continue reading “Buy or Rent? Finance or Lease? The Contact Center Edition”
We ran into a bit of a troubleshooting situation fairly recently. A few different clients were reporting that calls were disconnecting. Not only were calls disconnecting, but they were disconnecting at reproducible durations. Right away, given the nature of the drops, we can rule out normal every day occurrences, like horrible cell phone reception or driving through a tunnel. Continue reading “Why are my calls disconnecting? I’m not in an elevator!”
For large installations configuring all the VoIP phones can be a pain. Perhaps you have polycom SIP phones which I have seen in the past delay starting the web configuration interface until after the phone is ready to handle calls. This is great when the phone is in use as the user can use the phone sooner while not waiting on the processes providing the configuration interface, however when configuring a large number of phones it causes delays if manually configuring each phone. Even when the config interface comes up fast it’s still a labour intensive task to go through each phone manually configuring them. During this manual process mistakes can and will, especially given a large enough set of phone be made, some of which may not be initially obvious. For example, if the dtmf mode of the 47th phone configured today left at the default of RFC2833 but the system is using SIP INFO? That phone gets used for a while but then the user goes to use an IVR and has to file a trouble ticket to get it resolved after finding out dtmf isn’t functioning as expected.
The solution to this manual headache and time drain? Provisioning. This is where the phone system will have the configuration for each phone and the phones download their configuration so they are synced with the phone system options.
Provisioning is usually accomplished via a tftp where the phones configuration files reside. At boot the phone gets an IP via the local dhcp server and the dhcp response has an extra configuration setting, usually Option 66, to inform the phone where the tftp server is. From the tftp the phone will generally request a general model configuration file, this can handle firmware upgrades and common settings specific to a model or make of phones. After that file a request is usually made for a file with the MAC ID to differentiate the phones. This MAC ID file is specific to that individual phone and will contain the details of the SIP connections, extensions, and anything else just for that phone.
The Q-Suite supports provisioning a number of SIP phones from various manufactures. With easy support via templating to extend to new models as needed. The administrator only needs to collect and input the MAC ID’s and choose the proper template when configuring the extensions and the generation of the config files will be done for them. With DHCP Option 66 is set properly boot up the phones and they’ll be functional and making calls.
You need both reliability and performance in your VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) software to get the best out of it. Traditionally, performance has been emphasised in telephony software such as Asterisk and Asterisk-based call center software with reliability coming from the infrastructure you set up around it. Network and hardware performance are key components of a reliable voice connection. For this reason, call signalling in VoIP has been done via UDP (User Datagram Protocol) most of the time. Continue reading “SIP With TCP Benefits Asterisk Call Centers”
You can no longer doubt that Asterisk is here to stay in the telecommunications world. Over the last decade, the rate of adoption has been skyrocketing. Call centers are no longer complaining about Asterisk-based solutions, or worrying about having to have an Asterisk expert on-hand. With Asterisk providing a platform for contact center ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) solutions to sit on, you can transition from a legacy system to one built on readily available and mature software. Continue reading “Save Money, Do More With Asterisk-based Call Center Software”
Do you know who your clients are? Do your agents? In some outbound dialing campaigns, it’s critical for your agents to know to whom they are speaking before they’ve said “Hello.” The leads are distinct enough that the agent needs to familiarize herself with the particulars of this particular contact before clicking “Dial”. In some cases, this may mean a few minutes of study. Continue reading “Better Know Your Leads — Outbound Dialing Part 2: Preview Dialing”
As internet users, we were all exposed to one of the most ridiculous debates of all-time a short while ago: Is the dress white and gold or blue and black? It was (clearly) blue and black. However this leads me into my next topic. As a user of contact center ACD software, what do I see? Let’s talk a bit about privileges. Continue reading “White and Gold or Blue and Black?”