Contact Center Software for Asterisk Telephony
Information for Asterisk based contact centers
Queues are the backbone of an inbound call center ACD. They are typically the primary destinations for your callers and customers, so you need to be sure that they are properly structured and implemented. Let’s have a look at a trio of dialplan components that can help you manage how and if callers get into your queues and what to do with them once that happens.
Continue reading “Useful Queue Control Features in the Dialplan Builder”
Quality wines. That term can mean a different thing to different people. Some folks may consider a sub-$100 bottle of wine as not being a quality bottle. Some people may consider quality to be simply something they can drink easily without wanting to wretch at the flavour. One thing is almost an absolute though when it comes to wine: They get better with age. Callers who are waiting in your IVR queues, however, are the exact opposite.
Continue reading “Quality Wines are the Opposites of Callers in Queue”
Shocking fact: Your callers don’t enjoy waiting to speak to an agent.
Sometimes it’s not the actual amount of time waiting, though. It’s the perception of time.
Everyone’s experienced the perception of time issue. You’re sitting in a meeting, and you look at the clock. After what seems like hours, you see it’s only been a few minutes. You get home from work. You finally have a chance to that thing you wanted to do. You start doing it, then after 10 minutes you look at the clock and an hour has passed. Continue reading “10 Ways to Control Time in the Call Center ACD”
Another year and another Super Bowl has passed us by. With all the hoopla that comes from the two weeks between the Conference Championship games and the Super Bowl itself, talking about quarterbacks-this and defences-that, it’s not really surprising that the guys responsible for holding the footballs in place for their kickers get next to no attention. Even though this role is highly overlooked, it can be amazingly crucial to the outcome of a game. Good or even great holds that result in points for the team are par for the course. However, a botched hold can ultimately end a team’s season and perhaps even their chance to take home the Vince Lombardi trophy. We’ve seen these before with Tony Romo in real-life and with Ray Finkle in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective for a hilariously fictional take on the situation. The bottom line here is that holding is very important and let’s have a look at how this can be done in a proper manner.
Continue reading “Hold it steady! Hold it steady! It’s good! How to use Hold in your Call Center”
We all know what privileges are. They’re some form of a set of rules that allow/disallow use or access to certain things. A few simple examples are a driver’s license where you need to be 16 years of age or the ability to purchase alcohol which happens to be 19 years of age here. How can you use privileges in the Q-Suite to better control your contact center?
On hook agents. I can see arguments both for and against these types of agents, but which side of the argument will end up working for you in your contact center acd? It’s a tough question to fully answer, but let’s have a look at a few of the pros and cons.
Continue reading “On Hook Agents: Will They Work for Your Call Center?”
Waiting in an inbound queue until the next available agent is prepared to accept your call is an inevitable situation. If you’ve ever needed to call your service provider to add/cancel services or to place an order over the phone, you will run into this scenario. Using some of the available features in the Q-Suite, as a call center ACD administrator you can help ease the waiting times of your customers by providing manually triggered exits for the caller.
Continue reading “Give Your Callers Exits to Keep Them From Waiting”
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”
Failure is not an option. Failures are disruptive, and a disrupted call center floor is an expensive headache to manage. The promise of Asterisk, which was replacing monolithic telephony hardware installations with multiple commodity servers running call center software, was a lowering of the total cost of ownership. The promise has been fulfilled, but enterprise contact center installations have to be mindful of the possibility of hardware or software disruptions. This is why we introduced the HAASIPP, to allow call survival, and the Overseer to manage processes and allocate them between servers in a high availability solution. Continue reading “Adding Reliability With The Overseer and High Availability”
Let’s look at the following scenario that may come into play in a call center:
I can see two glaring issues here: Continue reading “Automatically dialing DIDs on disposition”