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Call Center Software for Cloud Deployment using Asterisk

Asterisk is a versatile VoIP PBX telephony engine that has experienced phenomenal growth from inception. Its market penetration is not easily measurable due to the diversity of applications using it.   It should come as no surprise that Asterisk has a significant presence in Cloud installations as it can function as a telephone switch, a media server, a protocol gateway, and a conference bridge. Asterisk has become a preferred choice for the underlying telephony platform for setting up distributed multi-tenant PBX and call centers.

We are seeing more providers choose Asterisk or telephony platform built around it for their cloud deployments.  For example a recent announcement about VitalVox selecting the Q-Suite platform which uses Asterisk.

Most providers are not going to roll their own Asterisk solutions due to the extensive toolset needed to maintain the dialplan while separating multiple tenants easily.  This is where the value of a product like the Q-Suite comes into play as it handles low level configuration of Multi-Tenant PBX and Contact Center.  Then of course there are Reports which are also included in these products which provide real time and historical system utilization, call stats, etc.

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Audio alerts triggered by real-time contact center ACD activities

Automatic Call Distributors (ACD) control and manage the work-flow of a contact center. A multi-channel contact center ACD offers skills based routing and queue prioritization for phone calls, emails, and web channels. The real-time queue metrics are a good indicator of the contact center activities. Even with work-force  management (WFM) software predictions, it is not always possible to staff adequately for handling sudden spurts in call volumes. Organizations should have procedures in place to handle such events. One such option is having supervisory staff and supplementary employees participate in call handling if required.

Key queue metrics like the total number of calls waiting in a given queue, the wait time, the abandon rate, and the overall service level provide a measure of  real-time call center activities. A good contact center software will allow call center managers to set conditions based on the  queue metrics to trigger audio alerts. Different audible alerts can be set, each specific to a particular queue metrics parameter.

Q-Suite for Asterisk is a powerful contact center ACD offering such feature as a part of its call center software. It is a multi-tenant software for setting up Cloud based fault tolerant High Availability (HA) contact center solutions. Its audible notifications can be triggered by setting conditions on queue parameters that are monitored as a part of the real-time contact center reporting. These notifications allow the contact center floor operations to initiate procedures that are put in place for handling sudden spurt in call volumes.

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Multi-channel ACD in a Cloud setup

Cloud is the new frontier for voice telephony and the contact center ACD (Automatic Call Distribution). The convergence of the transport mechanism for Voice with Data through Internet Protocol (IP), the acceptance of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the default standard for Voice over IP (VoIP) transmission, and the consolidation of infrastructure accessible through Internet, have created a favorable environment for the growth of ‘Cloud’ based contact services.

Depending on the size and scale of a contact center operation, there are some options on how best to migrate to the Cloud. The larger operations can move to managed services in a Cloud platform where they exercise control over the operation without actually owning all the infrastructure. The smaller operations can be a part of a multi-tenant installation that is segmented and partitioned to provide an exclusive setup. Both these options provide a number of advantages including lower cost of setup and operation as well as the ability to have a geographic distributed work-force.

A multi-channel ACD handles more than voice. The additional channels may handle Chat. Email, and Social media. The ACD serves to distribute the conversations based on skills based routing but the media in the individual channels are handled by the respective media server. In the case of voice communications, the media server is the PBX switch. Asterisk dominates this category as a hybrid PBX which works seamlessly with both VoIP and the traditional Time Division Multiplexing (TDM).

The underlying technology stack for setting up multi-channel contact center ACD does not differ very much between a premise installation or a data center installation in the Cloud. With a competent hosted service provider to offer managed services, this can dramatically reduce the associated Information Technology (IT) operational cost. Also, sites with good connectivity offer the ability to have geographically distributed and remote agents. Some contact center software are multi-tenant by design and this enables the hosted service provider to offer shared IT resources for its tenants, thereby lowering the overall operational cost.

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Moving Contact Center infrastructure into Cloud

It is not an easy decision but we can feel the trend. The growth of IP (Internet Protocol) Network and the availability of Bandwidth at lower costs are pushing organizations to consider data centers for their infrastructure. There are compelling reasons to setting up a Contact Center in the Cloud.

Cloud in our context is a well recognized data center with excellent connectivity and decent infrastructure. Some of the immediate advantages of  Cloud for a contact center operation are, Continue reading “Moving Contact Center infrastructure into Cloud”