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.

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.