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SIP Registration Timeout Settings for High Availability

In setting up a high available telephony system most worry about the back end and ensure it functions as they would expect and require.  However one highly visible user issue I have seen is a misconfiguration of the connected SIP phones in regards to the registration timeouts.  When these are very high on your SIP phone then it may not notice a service has moved (via IP/DNS/etc changes) due to a HA switchover and can potentially miss incoming calls until it does.  Typically an outgoing call attempt will work or at the very least cause a registration attempt to the new server the service has moved to.

For example take a look at Aastra, their defaults in a few models I’ve seen are at a half hour for a failed registration.

aastra-default-configuration-reg-failed-retry

If the failed registration timeout is half an hour and the phone attempts to re-register and fails your phone will show an error or unregistered for the next half hour.  This can happen in the cases where the registration comes in as a box is failing or a failover happened and the configuration is being written/updated due to the switchover process.  More reasonable set of values are shown in the following.

aastra-configuration-reg-failed-retry

In this one I’ve lowered the registration failed retry and also the timeout retry timers.  These will make the SIP phone resolve the registration issue quicker by retrying more often than the defaults.  They could be lower depending on the situation.

One precaution before everyone sets these very low.  These settings should be set appropriately when the SIP phone is off-site and there are protections, for example Fail2Ban, in place to block brute force attacks.  In these cases where the SIP phone is on an app on a mobile device this failed registration timeout should be set high enough to not trigger a lockout of a valid device.  If the devices are in-house or IPs can be whitelisted then the values can be lower without worry.

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Smooth and Flexible Script Building for Call Center ACD using TinyMCE

Script building can be a long, cumbersome, tedious process for contact center ACD administrators. While some agent scripts might be limited to a few pages with only a few components per page, other scripts may be dozens of pages with dozens of components contained within each page. As the length of the script grows and the number of components increases, the person responsible for building the scripts may begin to lose interest, which could lead to errors in the script, causing an increase in the troubleshooting and validation periods for any type of QA that may be performed prior to rolling out a campaign into production. With the integration of TinyMCE into the Q-Suite’s powerful script builder, the monotony of the script building process should be vastly alleviated. Continue reading “Smooth and Flexible Script Building for Call Center ACD using TinyMCE”

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Rightsizing your Telephony System from the Beginning

A number of common questions come up when purchasing telephony systems. One of the most important which affects costing the system is the expected usage in terms of number of users, ports and active calls. Knowing current needs is relatively straight forward especially for an existing business. However the real issue is businesses are not static and you want your new ACD/PBX system to be able to grow with your organization.

Obviously one can throw money at the issue up front and spec out the system for the projected size required in the future. However the better option is to choose a solution that can scale as your business grows without the need to replace the full system.

We find some systems have a large hardware cost upfront and limit usage via licensing so later expansion is done via purchasing new licenses to unlock the hardware already paid for. The issue here is the initial investment is large and compromises are often made to fit within the current budget which limit future growth on the system.

Two better alternatives are:

  1. Purchasing a system which meets your needs for the near term which can scale properly to meet the demands of the business well into the future.  The Q-Suite telephony platform accomplishes this by having the built-in ability of adding additional asterisk servers and web servers to an existing installation to scale to meet the needs of a business as it grows.  Recently the option of monthly licensing has been offered to save even further on initial costs.
  2. Using a Cloud based ACD/PBX System. This lets a provider worry about hardware upgrades, trunks, etc and allows growth in smaller increments.  Look at the hosted provider VitalVox where your role is only to configure and manage the users, campaign, queues, and other features of your ACD/PBX system.
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Monthly Licensing Allows Flexibility on a Budget

When Indosoft first entered the telephony world, near the turn of the century, most of our deployments were small. Two-server predictive dialer or Do Not Call blockers ruled the day, and usually involved a lot of work to get integrated with the call center.  As a result, we had an inflexible pricing and payment policy, with the costs coming upfront.  Since those days, the IT and telephony world have undergone a dramatic change, as has our product line.  Over the last year Indosoft has experimented with monthly per-port pricing.  This option has been a hit with our clients, and is more frequently expected by new clients.  The widespread acceptance of on-demand pricing for hardware has led a push for on-demand pricing in other categories, and the software that runs on those servers is an ideal candidate. Continue reading “Monthly Licensing Allows Flexibility on a Budget”

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Realtime Workforce Assignment for Contact Center ACD

When operating an inbound ACD contact center, it is quite often the goal of the center to minimize the amount of calls that fall outside of the specified service level agreements for their queues. Clients may lose faith in the center’s ability to handle the expected call volumes if these numbers are too high. Abandoned calls are not a desirable outcome either, as those calls get aborted in the IVR and never had the chance to get routed to an available CSR. In this situation, it is vital for managers to be able to reallocate CSRs to the appropriate queues. Continue reading “Realtime Workforce Assignment for Contact Center ACD”

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Large Call Centers Migrating to Asterisk

Deciding whether to migrate a large call center away from a TDM-based PBX to VoIP-based Asterisk can be difficult. Any site wishing to do that would need to decide whether to go it alone, or use an existing contact center solution. Using an existing solution may cost more upfront, but you’ll have the advantage of not having to develop all the screens and reports yourself.

Continue reading “Large Call Centers Migrating to Asterisk”

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Cloud Offerings Simplify Call Center Deployment

One of the reasons Asterisk has taken such a large share of the telephony market is the ease of deploying it on commodity hardware with free, Open Source operating systems.  Commoditizing hardware and simplifying its deployment has been a key factor in the widespread adoption of the Cloud as a business concept. This makes the Cloud an ideal target for deployment of Asterisk-based contact center software.  However, requirements such as long-term storage of recordings or data have complicated the picture.  Once again, the Cloud offers a solution.  Services such as Amazon S3 provide a widely-available interface for the long-term storage of recordings while providing easy access when required. Amazon RDS, their database offering, puts the headache of tuning and configuring the database server back in the hands of Amazon.  Continue reading “Cloud Offerings Simplify Call Center Deployment”

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The Differences in Call Survival and Call Recovery

While investigating High Availability (HA) in CTI and PBX systems you will often find mention of Call Recovery. Another term you run into is Call Survival, which is often used interchangeably with Call Recovery incorrectly. This is because each is a different approach to solving a problem. The problem being a failure which would interrupt the calls of a system.

With Call Survival when a failure happens the caller and callee do not have to take action to continue their call as it survives the failure. At a high level this is done by reacting to the failure quickly and re-routing the audio path around the failure.

With Call Recovery when a failure happens the recovery is different depending on the system. Sometimes the caller will need to initiate the redial the callee or it could be an automated process but the callee still have to answer this new call.

From a user perspective the better option is Call Survival as they may only experience a momentary interruption in their audio as the path is rerouted around the failure instead of having to re-initiate a call to recovery it.

The Q-Suite platform supports Call Survival with the help of the Overseer Watchdog providing HA for other services in addition to being one part of the Call Survival solution.

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Dynamic Script Switching for Customer Service Representatives

Here is a situation we have all encountered over the years. When dealing with service providers via their contact center ACD, whether it is a cable, internet, phone, or insurance company to name a few, we will offer our best description about our issue to the current customer service representative (CSR). Too many times we are presented with the outcome of needing to be transferred to someone else who can better handle this particular inquiry. Once on the line with the next CSR, we are then forced to reiterate the exact same scenario that we had explained to the first CSR. This is not how a caller wants to spend their time. Continue reading “Dynamic Script Switching for Customer Service Representatives”