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.

Managing and keeping up with the “state of the art” in technology is always a challenge. In late 2002, the design architects at Indosoft were looking to move away from maintaining and enhancing our PBX software based on legacy CTI boards. Indosoft wanted to keep its focus on call center software development. The emerging confluence of VoIP and TDM, made possible by PBX software like Asterisk, created significant product development opportunities in contact center industry. After considerable due diligence, we began porting and migrating the outbound and the inbound call center suite to the Asterisk PBX platform.  Our Legacy to Asterisk migration was well timed.

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.

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.

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.