Within the Q-Suite we have our dialplan builder with extensive options to route and manipulate calls. The dialplan builder meets the needs of most situations but from time to time you need to get low level and go right into the asterisk dialplan. If it is only a couple of statements the dialplan builder has the Execute command, but when it’s more involved that’s where the Q-Suite’s Asterisk Scripts option comes in. Continue reading “Feature Highlight: Asterisk Scripts”
Voicemail in the Call Center ACD
We are going to talk a bit about voicemail in this post. Whether you like or dislike voicemail as a whole, I think we can agree that it is a fairly important medium for communication. Personally, I am not a huge fan of leaving and/or checking voicemail, but I may very well be in the minority. Let us go over some of the ways to configure and use voicemail in the Q-Suite. Continue reading “Voicemail in the Call Center ACD”
Save the State: Data Synchronization Between Master and Backup Services
When the center is actively handling calls, minimizing any disruptions is key. You don’t want to have your agents stop, log out, log back in, then attempt to continue as they were. Doing that is an efficiency killer. To avoid this, multiple copies of a single service can be set to run on different servers. However, data has to be kept current in order to avoid losing information when switching services from backup to master. Synchronization of information is absolutely required when we are attempting to set up redundancy for high availability in the call center.
Continue reading “Save the State: Data Synchronization Between Master and Backup Services”
Recycle Times in the Call Center ACD
Outbound dialing is still an integral part of the contact center acd landscape. Leads can be generated in a multitude of ways, such as purchasing a list or a website inquiry, and depending on the weighted priority, they may be called in different fashions. It’s abundantly clear, that when outbound dialing, your agents will not connect to every number they dial. When this case happens, the agents disposition the call in a relevant manner, and carry on with the next call. We need to make sure that these non-connected get called back in a timely fashion. This is where we use recycle times. Continue reading “Recycle Times in the Call Center ACD”
Improve Your Agents: Customizing Your Call Center Software Part 2
You can make your agents better. At least you can help them perform better, and you probably don’t care about the difference. The ability to adjust your incoming call flow improves operations from the client side and can make the system as a whole work better. Optimizing operations on the other end, the agent interface, can have the same effect once the call has been answered. The interface, especially the client interaction script, has to be well organized and present the correct information in an easy to read format in order to give your agent a chance to handle the call effectively. Continue reading “Improve Your Agents: Customizing Your Call Center Software Part 2”
Sometimes Good People Have Bad IVRs
Are you losi
ng customers to a bad dialplan? Trouble navigating an IVR is one of the most common customer service complaints people have. Why irritate your clients with a bad menu system? The truth is, it’s not always easy to build an IVR that is simple enough for most clients, yet sophisticated enough to route calls to the right party. Your call center’s ACD system may depend on it, however. Continue reading “Sometimes Good People Have Bad IVRs”
Handling Priority Calling in the Call Center ACD
If you are running inbound campaigns in your Asterisk based contact center ACD, it is quite possible that you may have tiers of callers or subscribers that you wish to handle differently based on the packages that these callers have purchased. In most instances, you would want to attempt to prioritize higher paying customers, so that they will continue being higher paying customers. Using the Q-Suite’s Priority Calling features can help you accomplish this. Continue reading “Handling Priority Calling in the Call Center ACD”
Beyond Asterisk High Availability (HA) Solutions
High Availability (HA) Asterisk solutions, once reserved for mission critical deployments, are now a part of every normal setup. With VoIP, clustering solutions depend on moving the IP traffic to a working server. Setting up a main and standby Asterisk system allows continuous availability of such a working Asterisk system. But telephony is more than a data system using IP traffic and such an HA arrangement is inadequate in ensuring the continuation of all the on-going calls at the time of the hardware or software failure. Going beyond this high availability for Asterisk, is the patented call survival method (US Patent US 20110310773 A1) and system that keeps calls alive while providing high availability.
A call center software manages hundreds of calls in different queues, connecting them appropriately. The call center ACD is a layer above the PBX which controls the routing through skills based routing and queue prioritization. When a software or hardware failure is encountered, all the on-going conversations and calls in the queue are lost. HA for Asterisk will get your system ready for future calls. With Call survival, the callers will be able to continue their on-going conversations or calls without the need to re-initiate. Implementation of call survival in call center solutions offers a redundancy beyond the normal high availability solutions implemented for Asterisk based call centers.
Let It Flow: Customizing Your Call Center Software Part 1- Customizing Your Call Flow
A big driver of the adoption of Asterisk is the flexibility it brings. It has been called the Swiss Army Knife of telephony with good reason. As a result, there are a number of things that one can do to utilize that flexibility and add a bit of customization to their Asterisk-based call center software. In most cases, the actual amount of modification done is pretty small, but it’s always nice to know the ability exists if needed.
Continue reading “Let It Flow: Customizing Your Call Center Software Part 1- Customizing Your Call Flow”
Feature Highlight: PBX Routing Rules
In the Q-Suite, we use PBX Routing Rules as the proper name for Time of Day scheduling. This feature is the backbone of the CTI Campaign Schedules, but is still quite useful for people who may not want to venture into the Contact Center portion of the product and are perfectly fine with sticking to the PBX aspect. Let’s have a look at a simple example showing how to use this feature.
