Contact center technology solution for Asterisk

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.

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.

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.