Contact center technology solution for Asterisk

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,

• Ability to setup geographically distributed contact center operations and work-force
• Take advantage of SIP terminations for telecom connectivity
• Scale on-demand both infrastructure and Telecom connectivity with minimum lead time
• Advantage of better infrastructure management through co-managed service

On top of all this, a Cloud infrastructure helps to convert up-front Capital cost to monthly service cost and reduces the requirement for expensive in-house IT resources. An Asterisk based contact center with a good software for managing your Call Center ACD and Dialer requirements will dramatically reduce cost and allow you to grow on demand with a superior distributed architecture and an open platform.

Asterisk is often referred to by many as the “Swiss Army-knife of Telephony”. It is a Soft-switch, a complete software based PBX switch with a full feature PBX and a VoIP stack supporting SIP, IAX and H323. It is also a hybrid switch with TDM support for ISDN PRI (T1/E1). The last few decades have been the age of software, propelled by the incredible power and flexibility of software driven systems. No wonder, Asterisk within a span of 10 years has overtaken all it peers and is the undisputed leader this field.

Contact center industry has immensely benefited from Asterisk. It has dramatically driven down the cost of setting up customer contact operations. I remember watching closely an advanced 100 seat contact center setup in 2000 which came around 10K per seat.  This enormous cost was driven by the technology stack of Dialogic boards, Microsoft servers, Dell hardware and Interactive Intelligence driven contact center software. It was supposed to deliver productivity increases to justify this high initial capital investment.  The weight of the Capital cost and the inability of the project to deliver revenues to sustain on-going costs killed the company.

Today you can setup a distributed and sophisticated 100 seat contact center more powerful than ever for  less than a one-twentieth of this cost. How did this happen? We can attribute it all to the power of the open source technology stack for contact centers. One key component in this stack is Asterisk, the hybrid IP telephony switch. Open source based technology platform provides an opportunity to assemble many of the important components of the technology stack required for setting up a next generation contact center at incredible cost savings.

With software driven systems (open or proprietary)  risk mitigation is important for mission critical systems. Software systems can exhibit bugs that can manifest in an unexpected fashion causing disruption to normal operations. It is important to select a contact center ACD that uses the power of software, detects mal-functioning sub-systems and provides redundancy and fail-over capabilities. A redundant system with fail-over mechanism is capable of ensuring that on-going and new calls into the contact center and ACD are preserved. Contact centers operating with a mission critical mandate require such a fail-safe mechanism for the calls to survive a single failure at any given time.

The availability of such an ACD and Dialer software for Asterisk makes this technology stack complete. With Q-Suite 5.5, Indosoft presents you with the capability of setting up a mission critical contact center technology stack on Asterisk. The contact center software has a sub-component built in to watch, detect and fail-over to redundant sub-components. Inbound call centers will benefit tremendously from this capability to continue operation without disruption when there are disruptions like hardware failure.

Before we get into aspects of setting up a contact center, it is important to clarify what I mean by “next generation”? I am referring to the infrastructure and technology associated with a contact center. What is so important about it? Technology evolution is a by-product of the demands placed by users to enhance productivity, offer flexibility and reduce the overall cost of acquisition and operation of contact centers.

Key aspects associated with a contact center build-out are the Telephone switch, ACD and Dialer software, hardware infrastructure and the telecom connectivity. Let us review all of these from a  next generation perspective.

Phone switch (PBX) is the single most important and expensive portion of any contact center. It controls the switching and allows the rest of the world to communicate with the contact center. In the last ten years we have seen incredible advancements in the field of telephony with VoIP slowly becoming mainstream. TDM phone lines like ISDN PRI (T1/E1) are still available but are steadily giving way to SIP. There is a very good reason. SIP is available on-demand and SIP does away with the need to plan and commission like a PRI. This allows contact centers to grow their capacity on-demand.  Also, SIP does not require special phone lines like PRI because it is IP based. A contact center PBX switch has to be a hybrid PBX with seamless integration between VoIP and TDM. One of the best known hybrid switches is Asterisk which will definitely qualify as a top of the line next generation PBX for many reasons. It is an open source switch with incredible features that proprietary telephone switches can hardly keep up with. Not going with Asterisk would have tremendous cost and feature related implications that very contact centers can afford. There are other advantges like voice recording and CODEC availability which are intrinsic to Asterisk.

ACD (Automated Call Distribution) and Dialer are the key drivers of any contact center operation. If you have chosen Asterisk, you will require an ACD that is capable of working and scaling with Asterisk. ACD and Dialer are distinct software layers on top of the phone switch that can provide important features like Skills based routing and Predictive dialing. Q-Suite is a unique multi-tenant contact center software that works with Asterisk and provides a feature-rich and scalable ACD and Dialer functionality.

If you have chosen Asterisk and Q-Suite as the technology platform for your contact center, you pretty much control the hardware selection. You will not require to buy any proprietary hardware and instead can use servers from known brand names like IBM, Dell or HP. Even better, you can opt to lease the hardware from data centers.  This gives you the opportunity to deploy in a reliable data center “Cloud”. Here there are options of running the system on Virtual machines. The other advantage of deploying in the Cloud is the option of choosing VoIP and SIP for your Telco connectivity. This is especially useful if you have to scale on-demand.

IP communication has propelled SIP into its dominant position. SIP offers great advantage to contact centers for telco connectivity as long as there is sufficient bandwidth and the latency is within prescribed limits. Latency is the time it takes for the voice packets to travel to a destination.

Setting up a contact center requires detailed planning and having good professional help for evaluating the technology stack is essential.

Folks at Indosoft remember deploying a distributed contact center platform for one of our customers at a co-lo in Chicago sometime in 2006. Their agents were working from South America and different locations within United States.  They had looked us up on the web while reviewing Asterisk related technologies. Asterisk had by then made quite an impression with its flexibility and feature-sets supporting both VoIP and TDM.  Back then, PRI was the preferred telecom termination and SIP with X-lite for agent telephone was a workable option, the big challenge being bandwidth.

Today, Cloud is a rage and hosted contact center service providers are everywhere. Setting up such a Cloud based contact center platform requires a robust ACD and Dialer software engine with all standard contact center features, out of the box. With over 5 years  of experience and product development in developing distributed contact center technology, Indosoft now offers  a feature-rich scalable platform for Cloud based call center services in Q-Suite 5.5. It is geared to meet and exceed the expectations of modern Cloud based contact center service providers. Its sophisticated CTI interface provides an opportunity for the Cloud contact center service providers to customize their interfaces to reflect the needs of their clientele.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) has revolutionized the contact center industry by delivering the ability to manage, route and handle customer interactions systematically and efficiently. Contact center software with superior ACD deliver robust, stable and proven call-handling capabilities to many mission critical businesses. Key ACD features include call routing, automated customer interaction, queuing with prioritization and balancing, as well as skills based routing.

Next generation ACD features provide flexibility to the call taking and handling processes of customer interactions, whether they are meant for high call volumes requiring call handling efficiency or low call volume, critical interactions requiring agility and unique processes. Enhanced functionality, such as skills based routing and voice recognition, has made these next generation ACD systems a must have for contact centers seeking to maintain their competitive edge. Technology has advanced in the underlying telecommunications connectivity, providing for unity of protocols like TDM (PRI E1/T1) or VoIP. Such advances allow ACD to seamlessly integrate VoIP and TDM, as well as handle all the PBX functionality. The resulting architecture provides the opportunity to create distributed contact centers with a centralized ACD and enables geographically distributed agent clusters to be easily deployed in order to achieve greater overall efficiency.

These evolutions in ACD highlight the emerging trends to maximize flexibility, agility and functionality within the contact center.  There is detailed white paper identifying key considerations when selecting a Call Center ACD. It also examines how Indosoft Q-Suite ACD  is capable of providing the differentiation demanded from a next generation contact center technology platform.

Thanks to Digium, Asterisk has connectivity to Skype network. It was announced in the fall of 2009 and we tried it out with our office PBX and were very satisfied. We have decided to add support to Asterisk Skype connectivity within our call center software Q-Suite.

For a call centre owner, this is beneficial because it allows you to do a few new things:

• Inbound call centres can now accept calls over the Skype network, they can even have a “click to call” button on their web site.  The Skype calls will go into the same queue as the PSTN calls. SkypeIn virtual numbers will also work in the same way.
• Agents working remotely (from home) can nail in over Skype. One advantage of this is that Skype does a much better job of going through firewalls than your average SIP client.  This will cut down on IT support as a technician won’t have to fight with configuring a $29.99 router’s port forwarding settings.
• SkypeOut can be used for outbound calls for competitive long distance rates.
• Skype uses the G.729 codec (included with Skype for Asterisk) which saves bandwidth on the outbound trunks

Telecom is going through a paradigm shift with VoIP dictating the direction. This has profound impact on business verticals where voice communication is a critical sub-set of their overall system. For example, sales and service departments, dealerships and similar functional units use custom applications and ERP systems which co-exist with good telephony platform. There are also other custom applications built to manage unique processes that require CTI functionality to handle voice communications. As these domains move forward with next generation systems for their business verticals they will require a next generation telephony platform with VoIP capabilities.

The well known brands like Nortel, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel and Alcatel provide VoIP enabled phone systems with ACD. But there are very few systems as omni-present as Asterisk, which has grown in stature to become the dominant hybrid PBX with VoIP. As an off-shoot of the open source software development for telephony, Asterisk offers an opportunity to reduce the overall cost of deploying feature rich and scalable phone systems.  Support is available from Digium through commercial agreements as well.

Applications handling voice telephony require sophisticated ACD. If we look at the needs of organizations like large automobile centers handling parts sales and service, travel agency contact centers handling cruise-ship bookings or customer service departments of online web stores, the level of sophistication required for the ACD becomes obvious. The IVR, call-flow, call routing and call handling demand versatility from the ACD.  Automatic call distribution is a general term used to collectively describe the ability of a phone system to handle, prioritize and process calls in conjunction with business data and flow. An office will generally be a combination of PBX extensions and call center agents. The end points are PBX extensions or on-hook or off-hook call center agents. Large volume call center agents are generally on-hook with head-sets where as small volume call centers might want their agents to be on-hook and be ready to multi-task between calls. Integrating an ACD into any business application (CTI integration) requires an efficient and feature rich API. Indosoft recognized this need as early as 2004 and set about developing an ACD that works with Asterisk.  Now it offers a scalable feature rich ACD with .NET and socket API for CTI integration of its call center ACD for Asterisk. Business verticals can migrate to Asterisk telephony for its next generation product using Indosoft ACD.

There is a constant demand from our contact center software customers for greater granularity in the details of the call center reports. Reports are based on data collected and retained by the system and there are numerous reporting possibilities on Agent, Queue and ACD performance. Here are some of the generic contact center reports based on Indosoft call center software, Q-Suite.

• Agent Time Profile: During every session, the time spent by an agent on all agent states including custom DND states can be compiled and presented as a time profile. Agent time profile in an indicator of time utilization by an agent.
• Agent Performance: Call disposition provide an indication of the  conversion rate for an agent. Both inbound and outbound have different wrap-ups and are compiled by the hour for the all call dispositions.
• ACD Performance: Provides data on abandons, wait-time, SLA and related real and historical information for all calls. It is an indicator of how well the queues and calls are being handled by the call center collectively as well as individually by the agents.
• Queue Performance: This is more granular provides metrics on calls grouped by queues. Service level represents a measurable value for the speed at which calls are handled by the call center. Abandoned calls and the average wait time before abandon are important measures of  queue performance.
• Agent-Queue data: Agent information is combined with Queue data to provide insight  on how well the calls are handled. There are useful informations within the Agent Queue data that can reveal how many times a call was put on-hold or transferred.

To obtain a Call Detail Record (CDR) of a call from cradle to grave is challenging for VoIP and hybrid telephony. Asterisk is a leading platform for IP telephony and seamlessly handles VoIP or TDM. This is a great strength within Asterisk but at times it is difficult to extract accurate CDR information due to the variety of channels that are created in the process of handling a calls within a call center ACD.

Within Q-Suite we have made significant enhancements by tagging and following calls with universal identifiers. A detailed CDR table keeps track of the call progress. This allows  ’Cradle to Grave Reporting’ for contact centers.  Q-Suite  ’Trunk-Tracker’ module monitors information on the state of the channels and records the call detail. Agent screens record agent activity for each call. From within the Dialplan builder, billing related call details can be triggered as the call travels through the IVR. With all the data collected, extremely granular reporting is achievable.

The agent screens are designed to track all the agent initiated activities and store the information. Q-Suite has a well defined ACD for call centers with  a detailed API interface enabling vertical business applications to embed CTI within their interface. Q-Suite ACD is desgined to allow easy migration to IP telephony using Asterisk. It is important for custom applications using Q-Suite ACD for Asterisk, to store all agent states in the database to generate detailed reporting.

Asterisk is modular and has so many incredible built-in applications. Modern day call centers require a lot of functionality and, Asterisk provides a contact center platform that is truly versatile, at tremendous cost savings.  Live listening in Asterisk is an exciting feature for call center managers. Live listening is not new but Asterisk makes it much more accessible with its chan_spy. G729 is a popular codec (you can purchase G729 license from Digium) which reduces bandwidth consumption to around 45 Kbps per channel. When bandwidth costs are at a premium G729 can provide a 50% savings. Agent phones using G729 can minimize transcoding and reduce system load on Asterisk. Eyebeam, the licensed full featured version of X-lite, is a popular soft-phone with inbuilt G729 codec.

Indosoft  call center software Q-Suite runs on Asterisk and we come across a variety of infrastructure variations in our contact center technology deployments. In one such installations which uses G729 for all its outgoing calls, the call center supervisor complained about calls getting disrupted every time they use snoop to perform live listening. We set up a test rig and tried to snoop into a SIP channel with Eyebeam G729 without realizing that the silence suppression was turned on. Many of the applications within Asterisk do not send packets unless they are receiving packets and Asterisk does not support silence suppression. Of course, this is bound to cause issues if the Eyebeam setting allowed silent suppression. Agent will stop hearing the other end when they are silent and listening. But the most interesting aspect is the way this issue gets reported by call center staff as  ’calls getting dropped or cut-off’. It is important to make sure that the setting for silence suppression is left checked as shown in the screen-shot below. A similar issue with the default setting of call inactivity results in X-Lite dropping the the connection .

Silence suppression setting for Eyebeam

Efficient network setup can enhance the quality of your VoIP experience.  Even if you are averse to VoIP terminations for routing long distance traffic, within your call center, you can take advantage of VoIP. Here is a simple but efficient topology for Asterisk based call center setup.

Here all the agents, supervisor and admin phones are within the LAN and have assured bandwidth. Good quality IP phones from Polycom, SNOM, Linksys and other vendors can serve as the admin phones. Agents can use softphones like X-Lite or Eyebeam. An enterprise grade call center software like Indosoft Q-Suite will provide all the necessary features to setup and manage an advanced contact center. I recommend DELL 2950 category of servers which has served as very well in the past. The Dell web managed switches are inexpensive and work well within the contact centers. We implemented our first VoIP based contact center using Asterisk in 2003 with the long distance traffic terminated on PRI using Digium TDM board.