• 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.

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

Asterisk based contact center network layout

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.

In one of our recent deployments, we were forced to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.0x because DELL had moved on from the world of DELL 2950 servers to a newer generation hardware. Everything looked great and we completed the install in 2 days and had them working well during our testing period which lasted a day.  Next day morning when the contact center shift started and the first agent of the call center tried to login, Apache seg faulted. We restarted Apache and nervously watch the call center operation and everything worked well for the rest of the day. The day after morning, again as the first call center agent tried to login, Apache seg faulted.  A quick restart and the day goes by without any hitch. There is very little tolerance for disruption in contact centers as it disturbs their rhythm. In this case, there was little disruption to the smooth operation of the contact center but eye brows were being raised. Of course some of our bright computer scientists were able to identify the issue. Apache kept is DBI connections alive overnight but MySQL closed it. When Apache tried to connect it failed and something did not handle the error properly. The solution was in place but the watch of the contact center continued for a week .

As you all know, clients start questioning about the quality of the call center software, its maturity, our capability to deploy call center solutions etc. It appears like everyone is so on the edge. It is incredible. Everything seems to be on demand and ‘Just in time’.

The Script Builder has tools to add custom variable including LOV and Parent-Child LOV as well as ability to start and stop selective voice recording based on triggers. It allows for initiating TPV (Third Party Verification) calls for completion of sale. You can build neat applications like a trouble ticket system or blend a campaign which does outbound dialing but expects inbound calls on the same campaign. You can build a multi-page script with the ability to branch to another page based on the script. Incorporating other web based CRM or sites into the script is as simple as a click of a button. With the ability to insert parameters into command line for URL, you can open and display the relevant information from any web based application. This Script Builder makes Indosoft call center software Q-Suite an extremely powerful enterprise grade contact center software solution.

Asterisk introduced MySQL CDR as an enhancement to its CDR (Call Detail Record). CDRs provide a detailed log of call activity and an ideal CDR especially for use in contact center software should capture the complete event life cycle of a call. Typically PBX and media gateways might want to be able to do ‘Third Party Billing’. CDR is also critical for ‘Least cost Routing’ billing as well as fraud detection, and resource management. Call center software requires complete cradle to grave life cycle capture of the call detail. In a multi-tenant software these call details are segmented based on the tenants of the call center software suite. Within a tenant, the billing details of the call center software will have to be identified at Queue level so that an outsourced contact center can share its agents among multiple clients and be able to bill them appropriately based on calls.

By default, Asterisk provides CDR output as a flat text file. The Asterisk MySQL CDR add-on can be used to insert this data into a MySQL database. Unfortunately, this can cause serious issues for a call center software. Within a contact center, the call center software needs to be able to use resources quickly and efficiently for both inbound ACD and outbound predictive dialing. After a hangup of a call, the channel in Asterisk stays open till the CDR write has completed. With the flat text file, this only takes milliseconds due to operating system file buffering. If you are writing the CDR to MySQL and the database is slow to respond, the channel will stay open and locked for several seconds. Implementing extra features within Asterisk that expect a channel to be freed and available for other operations within reasonable time, will encounter nasty surprises. A perfect example would be to implement a TPV (Third Party verification) for completing a sale in both inbound and outbound call centers using techniques that expect the channel to be free once you disconnect a call. A contact center with limited outgoing line resources will experience serious difficulty if the call center software is unable  to use these lines in a time effective manner for calls. Taking this a step further, if the MySQL database server fails or if the call center has network issues, the channels will stay open indefinitely causing your contact center enormous grief. This will go on until the channel count reaches a threshold and the call activities will cease.

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.

More to Follow…

In the emerging union of data and voice where the border between IT software and telephony blurred, the Asterisk PBX has proven to be a life saver. The vision and foresight of Mark Spencer and his team has enabled Asterisk to be a dominant force in the PBX realm. For Indosoft, there were a few surprises along the way. One of the more significant limitations was in the design architecture of the built-in ACD in Asterisk.  Automatic Call distribution is an important component of any inbound call center. Skills based routing is an essential ingredient for achieving efficiency and quality of service that inbound call centers need. Call center managers look for a lot of flexibility in skills based routing.  Indosoft invested considerable effort in research and development to design and build an ACD that is truly skills based and which can work with Asterisk. This ACD architecture takes full advantage of all the features available in Asterisk without sacrificing the flexibility of skills based routing and prioritization.

Skills are unique to the functions of a call center. Examples of skills could be English language skills, Spanish language skills, Sales skills, Customer Service skills, etc. Skills can be defined and agent competence rated so each skill can be assigned to create a matrix.

Agent Skill Matrix

The queues in an inbound call center require a set of skills so that competent agents can answer calls. Call center managers are usually very adept at identifying the queues required. In large out sourced call centers this can be generated using tools to identify all the combinations. “Spanish, Customer Service” is an example of a queue. The skills in Spanish and skills in Customer Service are together required for answering calls in this inbound queue.

Queue Skill-set Matrix

It is a lot easier to assign competence levels for agents at queue level than skill level. Also, it is essential to keep the gradation to the required minimum to make it faster for the ACD to decide on the available agent competent to handle the call.