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.

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.

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.

You can have all your call center agents on VoIP  using IP phone or soft-phone within your internal LAN.  This is a relatively safe option where you can ensure required bandwidth using inexpensive web managed switches. There should be no measurable delay within your LAN to ensure very good quality voice. Any sane LAN design should achieve this.

You can also get a VoIP provider for terminating your calls to and from the outside world. Here the bandwidth and delay are critical. An uncompressed voice will require 100 Kbps and using G729 CODEC you can get away with 50 Kbps per voice conversation approximately. Generally SIP termination is a great option if you are maintaining your infrastructure in a co-location. The back-end bandwidth and latency to your SIP termination provider will not be a big issue. This is a great option for setting up at-home agents.

Another option is the Skype for Asterisk where you can take advantage of the Skype connectivity and its calling rates to make calls. Skype interconnectivity to Asterisk allows Asterisk users to make use of Skype’s superior codec and voice quality for VoIP.

When VoIP is not good and not an option for your site, the tradional TDM (PRI E1 or T1) is available through add-on telephony boards from Digium or Sangoma. What is more is if PRI is not available, you can use SS7 (ISUP) to connect to the next level.

You can decide to record selectively or all calls in Asterisk. One hour of voice recording at 64Kbps will consume 29 MB of memory. This should give you a rough idea on the storage requirement for uncompressed voice. You can also listen to live conversations.

You can also setup a fully functional PBX for the administrative section of your contact center. At Indosoft, we offer the feature rich contact center software Q-Suite which takes the mystery out of setting up enterprise grade call centers. Q-Suite offers all the features required for a contact center, right out of the box.

The costs of setting up contact centers depend on the infrastructure and the technology platform. The configuration of  your contact center will impact the capacity and overall cost. There are the costs for telephony and LAMP servers as well as the recording storage server (should you look at long term storage). The cost of any licenses like G729 Codec and Skype to Asterisk. It is important to remember that the most important and valuable components like Asterisk PBX, MySQL database, Apache Web Server, Ubuntu Linux all come without any price thanks to the incredible world of Open Source Software. The cost of the call center software, setup, installation and support have to be added to the cost of hardware and infrastructure. For a 100 seat installation (excluding the cost of agent machines), the cost per seat can run around 400 to 500 USD per seat. Compare this to what I can recall from the year 2000 when was in excess of 5000 USD per seat. To be honest, those contact centers were no where near as sophisticated as the present day call centers. Truly, I am amazed at the cost reduction.

Let us examine the requirements for an inbound call center. It could be either at a company premise or an out-sourced call center. Most out sourced call centers manage multiple clients at the same time. This means that the call center software should be able to segregate and manage multiple clients. This is different from a Multi-tenant call center software. Hosted providers require multi-tenant call center software so that they can offer the services to different tenants.

Inbound call centers require good ACD with skills based routing as well as  front-end call routing and processing capability. An IVR (interactive voice response) will provide flexibility for the call center to process calls before moving them to Queues with live agents. The call center software should have good GUI based tool to setup and change call routing and processing without requiring skilled programmers. Once calls move into Queues, skills based routing is a good way to get the most suitable to agent to answer the call.

There are numerous occasions when a call center software will have to use sophisticated call routing and call processing  to improve the efficiency of the call center. IVR and automated call processing can be used to handle calls that do not require agent intervention. The call center may want to offer seperate premium and normal service by providing separate phone numbers or using any other identifiable parameters.

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