Skype for Asterisk, another wonderful development for Asterisk users

In 2003, when Indosoft started migrating its call center software to Asterisk, we knew it was the right move because we had switched over to Linux in 1999 and seen its benefits. We were not quite sure of the magnitude of change unleashed by Asterisk and its impact on the PBX market. After all, we were selling contact center solutions and were looking to get more control of the costs associated with development and support. When we look at Asterisk, it is from this narrow perspective of call center requirements even though we realize that Asterisk serves a very large community with a broader range of requirements.

Skype has been another bright spot in the world of IP telephony. Today most of Indosoft's recurring telecom costs are spent on Skype and we are extremely impressed. The incumbent controls the last mile and we still may good money to them for the remaining PSTN lines. The low bandwidth usage and the higher voice quality makes Skype an outstanding carrier. The fact that they can connect to existing PSTN as well as provide incoming DID makes them extremely relevant for business users.

Skype for Asterisk is like icing on a cake. It is a one time license fee that allows Asterisk servers to use Skype network. There are great benefits. Skype provides Business Control Panel to manage the Skype accounts. We see some great potential benefits by using Skype for Asterisk in our contact center solution deployments. The two obvious advantages are the low long distance tariff without the need for long term contracts and the use of Skype to Skype user connections. Asterisk world is expanding and this is an assertion of the domination of Asterisk in the PBX domain.

Mitigating risks while deploying contact center solutions

Contact centers are situated everywhere around the Globe and words like BPO and back-office a permanent part of our vocabulary. In 2000, I remember us taking more than a month to install and cut-over a call center solution for a 60 seat contact center. We were unique in one sense, we had switched over to Linux and could do lot things remote. Today it is a completely different world and we almost all of our contact center installations, remote, whether it be Nigeria, Botswana or Europe. We can install a full feature call center software and solution in 2 days once the hardware and infrastructure ready and the network access and bandwidth are made available. The operating system install with flavors like Ubuntu make it so easy that we don't think about the complexities too much. The telecommunication infrastructure has become extremely versatile and complicated at the same time. You may have agents sitting in Philippines, infrastructure in U. S. A. or Europe and handling calls for various geographic domains.

The risk of issues cropping during a contact center installation has increased manifold. There are too many moving parts. The server hardware, the Linux OS versions, Asterisk, Our call center software Q-Suite and VoIP. It is not easy and the demands are a lot higher. Components like Apache, MySQL and modules of different programs and framework add to the complexity. It is not possible to sit on a stable version of your software as the underlying structure is changing. Every major commercial software vendor applies patches periodically. Once upon a time, there was the concept of carrier grade equipment and it applied to the software with the equipment. The availability and capability of Asterisk has made it easy for small operators to get into the business of reselling terminations without investing on the kind of redundancy and fail-over protections.

It is all for the good in the long run and points to the need for good project management while deploying call center solutions.

Queue Prioritization and Skills based routing for contact centers using Asterisk

Inbound contact centers demand sophistication in managing the call routing. Skills based routing, queue prioritization and balanced queues are a few key requirements for every call center software.

In new generation Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) design, the call center software has the ability to setup many queues, each of which will require one or many skills to handle the incoming calls. The contact center management would identify and rate each agent for the skill-sets. Typically the skill level variation is recorded numerically by of a scale of 1 to 10 or 1 to 5, where 1 might indicate top skill and 5 or 10 might indicate the lowest skill level. When an agent logs into the call center software, it will associate the agent with all the queues for which the agent has the required skill-set. Inbound calls are routed by the dialed DID/DNIS numbers setup for each inbound service. The calls in the queue will be routed to the agent with the highest rating or priority for the group of skills associated with the queue. This is skills based routing. Queue prioritization is when one queue has priority over other queues. There are circumstances when two queues may require the same skill-sets but one queue might have to be answered ahead of the other queue.

Let us review how inbound calls get routed by the ACD of a call center software with skills based routing and queue prioritization.

Scenario 1: If calls are waiting in queues and an agent gets free, the ACD will route the oldest call from the queue where the agent has higher skill level. If the agent has same skill level for all queues, the ACD will route the longest waiting call to the agent.

Scenario 2: If multiple agents are waiting and a call comes into a queue, the ACD will route the call to the agent with the higher skill level on the queue. If the agent skill levels are same, the agent waiting the longest will get the call from the ACD. The queue prioritization can impact this. Any queue with higher priority will impact the way ACD will route the calls. Calls in a queue with higher priority will get to the agents ahead of the calls in other queues. Here the skills based routing and queue prioritization can be adjusted to achieve the required call routing rules.

.NET library integrates Call Center Software for Asterisk with Native Windows Client

As we call know, Microsoft Windows dominates the desktop world. When we built our call center software for Asterisk on Linux, we initially settled on Mozilla Firefox as the standard web browser for interface. As our product gained market acceptance, we realized that there were a lot of application written in native windows environment which are used within the realm of a call center application. We always had a socket interface API to our call center software Q-suite which we were able to wrap within an OCX interface. As a natural progression, we now have a .NET API to the call center software which is a ideal fit for the native Windows clients.

For applications used by contact centers, there is a great advantage to using a .NET interface. Organizations having invested considerable time and effort in developing custom Windows application can easily integrate their application to our call center software suite for Asterisk. With Asterisk being the dominant platform for call center telephony and Microsoft Windows being the dominant platform for native client custom applications, it makes a lot of sense to integrate the CTI (Computer Telephony Interface) aspect of our call center suite for Asterisk using .NET interface.

With this approach, the computer telephony integration can be selective about the call center functionality. A perfect example is the call flow interaction often referred to as the "scripting". Many organizations have created tools which are optimized to their business and would not want to migrate out of it to adapt to an ACD for inbound or a Dialer for outbound. A .NET integration into their custom application will give them the required call center application for both inbound, outbound and blended mode. Our call center software is content to work behind the scene. This allows organizations to benefit from the use of Asterisk PBX.

Yeah, everybody uses Asterisk for call centers, now!

Indosoft has been in the business of selling CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) and call center software for 9 years. I have been handling all sales related inquiries and technical demos. for most of the period. I was astonished when one of my inquires and future client made this comment "Yeah, everybody uses Asterisk for call centers, now". He runs a Microsoft shop and is extremely technically savvy and when he started the conversation, I was expecting him to give me a third degree once he realized that the Indosoft call center software Q-Suite runs on top of Asterisk PBX.

Asterisk is a phenomenon like Linux and it came at the right time to revolutionize telephony. Back in late 2002 when we were using Pika for CTI, Asterisk for a great temptation. There was some apprehension about VoIP and QOS. SIP was evolving but Jim Dixon's Zapata TDM board and the Digium hardware compensated adequately to make Asterisk usable. We took the tentative steps in 2003 and started porting our call center software suite to Asterisk. It has been an unrelenting march for Indosoft and its migration to Asterisk platform. Today we have matured our call center software suite for Asterisk with a full feature enterprise grade contact center software. It has been an amazing evolution.

Our multi-tenant call center software (Q-suite) development along with the prolific evolution of Asterisk and Linux has moved us very close to a the goal of having "contact center software in a box". With VoIP starting to dominate the telecom termination market, this will dramatically reduce the cost of setting up an enterprise grade contact center with ACD and skills based routing using the inbound call center software.

Datapoints for contact center software reporting

Generating meaningful detailed reports on the daily operations of a contact center is essential for every call center manager. The software for running and managing the call center operation should collect correlated information from the inception of the call till its termination. These data points generate adhoc and historical reports.

In an inbound call center, an ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) manages the call grouping based on DID/DNIS and takes care of routing the calls. If we take the example of the Indosoft call center software Q-Suite, the call center software feeds the DID/DNIS information it receives from the Asterisk PBX to the ACD. A true ACD will allow the call to be processed and managed before routing to a skills based queue. Depending on the nature of the inbound contact center operation, many calls may be routed through an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) before being handed over to a Queue. Based on the skills required, the call will eventually flow into one of the many queues created with different skill requirements to handle the inbound calls efficiently. A well designed skills based routing will enhance the efficiency of the call center. With skills based routing, the first available agent with the required skill-set and the highest skill-level will handle the incoming call in each Queue.

Let us examine at all the datapoints for such an inbound contact center. An ACD summary report should provide a summary of all the inbound calls broken down by DNIS/DID and Queue. It should provide information on the time durations associated with the calls as well as abandons.

An agent time profile should associate the time spent by the agent while handling calls in an inbound contact center setup with skills based queues. This can be extended to link the queue data with agent data.

Some contact centers may also like to measure agent performance using the wrap-codes as a measure of productivity.

iHost PBX is multi-tenant and scalable to multiple Asterisk servers

Paradigm shifts happen once in a while and telephony is no exception. The rapid evolution of technology resulting in internet and VoIP is changing the face of communications. One of the most significant paradigm shift in the realm of business phone system and call centers has been unleased by the coolest of hybrid IP-PBX, Asterisk. There is a worldwide abundance in the use of Asterisk for PBX and call center applications. This has generated a significant demand for applications.

We developed iHostPBX for Asterisk to be deployed as a multi-tenant PBX which can be on a hosted platform. Our call center software Q-Suite has always been multi-tenant. With this, we have a scalable interface capable for managing mulitple Asterisk servers on a mulit-tenant PBX deployment.