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.

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.

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