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Transitioning Q-Suite 5.7 to use Asterisk 1.8

We have been a big beneficiary of the development and evolution of Asterisk, the leading next generation telephony switch. It probably has by far the largest deployed of PBX around the world. Like every good telephone switch, Asterisk has found its way into many different business applications. It is ubiquitous in the contact center industry today. Sometimes you will have to peel the outer layers of a telecom entity to realize that the underlying telephony platform has some Asterisk based application. There are very good reasons for all this. It is as powerful and flexible as you get when it comes to a telephone switch and a PBX.

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Asterisk usage in Virtual Call Centers

Virtual call center solutions are direct results of growth in Cloud based services, availability of affordable bandwidth and convergence of voice with data.  This makes ‘contact center as a service’, both flexible and affordable. Such services offer feature-rich call center software on a reliable telephony platform without the upfront capital investment. With rich feature set available on demand, companies can focus on improving customer care and plan additional capacity by adding distributed call center workforce anywhere to manage calls effectively. These factors make a compelling case for the use of Virtual call center. Continue reading “Asterisk usage in Virtual Call Centers”

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Essential Queue behavior for Multi-channel ACD

Queues are the back-bone of a modern ACD (Automatic Call Distribution). Within any sophisticated call center software, Queuing is an  abstraction of the information that represents all the various parameters and attributes of Queues and Calls. Queue management is the ability to efficiently distribute calls to the most appropriate Agent in a Call Center or an organization. The separation of queuing and queue management from the actual calls is a natural progression in the evolution of ACD. Skills based routing, Queue Priority and many other Queue manipulation features are a by-product of this progression.

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SaaS and Cloud deployments – Important considerations for Managed Services

There are a variety of reasons why companies are considering a move to Cloud or SaaS (Software as a Service) based contact center setup. The foremost consideration is the flexibility in terms of capacity and call center location. This has a bearing on the cost of the setup and on-going management. There are other aspects like on-going access to more recent technology, better functional capabilities and reducing internal IT resources for on-going upkeep. Ultimately it is the total cost of ownership and the return on investment that decides if managed services is the right option for a contact center operation. Continue reading “SaaS and Cloud deployments – Important considerations for Managed Services”

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High Availability SIP Proxy within Q-Suite ACD

Q-Suite started out as a Call Center ACD designed for Asterisk based contact centers. Today, Q-Suite 5.7 has evolved into a mature, robust and sophisticated ACD capable of supporting mission critical deployment through its powerful High Availability module. Q-Suite based deployments offer both High Availability and Call Survival through an elaborate Overseer Watchdog mechanism. Continue reading “High Availability SIP Proxy within Q-Suite ACD”

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Asterisk based ACD to complement Softswitch solutions

Soft-switches allow service providers to unify voice and data traffic in one network. In an IP network, service providers wanting to roll-out IP-PBX, long distance services or VoIP driven services use either Class 4 or Class 5 softswitch.  With the convergence of voice and data and the emerging domination of packet switching over circuit switching, we see a lot of softswitch implementations. They are primarily geared towards offering Hosted IP-PBX solutions and long distance services. Continue reading “Asterisk based ACD to complement Softswitch solutions”

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Managed services and Call Center as a Service

Managed Services is a way to off-load the responsibility for software, infrastructure and connectivity to a provider. Organizations are embracing managed services as a means to avoid the burden of capital cost and cost of IT management. It is a way to boost productivity and profitability in an increasingly competitive market with commodity-type price pressures.

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Complexities of Call Center Software development

Not often do we sit down and analyse call center software from a software development perspective. We are all familiar with data systems where the software primarily deal with data storage, retrieval and work-flow. Voice systems are a combination of telephony and software dealing with voice communications and CRM software (Customer Relationship Management). Though they have similarities, development of call center software is far more challenging. Continue reading “Complexities of Call Center Software development”