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.

Scaling Asterisk for larger call center deployments

Asterisk is an incredible hybrid-IP PBX conceived by Mark Spencer and now, an ever expanding open source project. His creative brilliance and the collective effort of volunteer programmers have permanently changed the world of telephony for good. This revolution coincided with the growth of IP and internet world. Today, Asterisk quietly fulfills the communication needs of thousands of office phone systems. The ever increasing presence and use of Asterisk in call centers is due to the tremendous growth of online internet commerce and the need for customer service and support. A good call center software with ACD is essential to setup a proper inbound call center.

Typical Asterisk runs on x86 Linux machine, with voice channels from SIP, IAX and TDM. Its ability to seamlessly interpolate SIP trunks and ISDN PRI (T1/E1) makes it invaluable. The VoIP options for telecom connectivity have become increasing attractive due to improvement in quality and pricing. The phones from Polycom, SNOM and a host of CPE manufacturers come with a variety of features taking advantage of VoIP. There are many quality softphone options like X-lite and Eyebeam for use in call centers. Different applications within Asterisk like the 'Dialplan', the 'Queue' and the 'Conferencing' provide extremely powerful call processing, call routing and call management.

There is a keen interest in scaling Asterisk for deployment in large enterprise call centers. There are a number of factors that limit the total number of concurrent phone conversations in a single Asterisk telephony server. These limiting factors originate from the limitation of the processing capacity and the resource availability of the hardware. Factors like CODEC conversion, Voice recording, compression and disk I/O are known to diminish this capacity.

Call center software for Asterisk makes selective use of the underlying PBX functionality. Scaling Asterisk for call centers would result in very large queue size with the ability to allow skills based routing across agents logged into multiple Asterisk servers. In the latest release of Indosoft call center software Q-Suite, adding additional Asterisk telephony servers allows for easy expansion of the call center capacity. Indosoft Q-Suite has a customizable web interface for agents with powerful administrative tools, open database, self-pacing predictive dialer and a sophisticated ACD capable of providing call distribution with skills based routing.

Our new kettle will give you nightmares

The kettle in the lunchroom broke so we got a new one, this is what it looks like:

The Top 5 Worst Uses of RAID

5. RAID-0: Why is is called RAID-0? That's exactly how many working filesystems you'll have when just one of the drives fails. This is only useful for scratch space that you don't really care about. Some people use it for online network backup, but that had better not be your only backup!

4. RAID-10: Sure, disks are cheap, but why waste them? The only time this is useful is if you created an array and got RAID-0 and RAID-1 mixed up and need a fast way to mirror the array.

3. Not monitoring the drive status. Yeah, RAID-5 is great, but if one of the drives fails, you'll need to replace it ASAP because all you have now is a RAID-0 array. Use the server's management tools and check them! Otherwise, just go with software RAID and monitor that.

2. Putting the root filesystem on a RAID-5 array. This works great, until one of the drives fails. Will your recovery tools be able to find the critical files needed for the system to boot? Really? Are you that sure? Just take the 50% size hit and make it a 2+1 spare RAID-1 array.

1. Windows software mirroring. Wow, adding mirrors is really easy with dynamic disks! It's too bad that for a mirrored drive set, you need both images present in order for the OS to boot. Oh, and many recovery tools, including the "Repair system" option on the install CD won't work with dynamic disks. Spend the extra $$$ and get a proper RAID controller, or best yet, don't use Windows as a server.

Asterisk based Inbound Call Centers for business communications

Asterisk is playing a dominant role in IP-based call centers. Intel processors have become less expensive and more powerful and a quad-core motherboard is able to offer over hundred concurrent calls with significant processing load from voice recording and transcoding. This has unleashed a powerful change with Asterisk based inbound call center solutions knocking at the last bastion of business phone systems based on closed proprietary ACD (automatic call distribution) technology from players and brands like Avaya, Cisco, ShoreTel, and Nortel Norstar and BCM.

Asterisk provides an IP-enabled platform with converged voice and data solution that is ideally suited for small to medium-sized businesses. It seems to have tremendous feature and cost advantage over any existing infrastructure in Meridian, Norstar, and other communication servers from Avaya and Cisco. As existing installs come due for replacement either due to age or service contracts, Asterisk offers an attractive alternative for PBX telephony, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as well as call routing for Inbound ACD platforms.

At Indosoft, we have built an ACD to provide a feature rich inbound functionality with superior skills based routing for Asterisk. This call center software suite comes with an easy to use setup wizard tool that simplifies the task of setting up and managing enterprise grade inbound call centers. It is designed as a multi-customer platform with extensive call processing and routing capability based on incoming DNIS. An integrated Dialplan builder will allow for processing calls using IVR before handing them to queues. The IVR setup will handle dips to the database for any automated processing required by the business process of the organization.

With the versatility of Asterisk and the Indosoft Inbound ACD, these inbound call centers can offer flexible solutions that were unthinkable just a few years ago.

The SPITstorm is upon us already

Ideally, every VoIP provider should allow open access to incoming calls over the Internet. Yet, few of them do. They know that as soon as they open it up, their subscribers will be inundated with SPIT (SPam over Internet Telephony). SPIT is worse than traditional telemarketing because all calls are automated, they come at all hours of the night and 100% of them are scams. This causes the next generation phone networks to be closed and is actually stalling true VoIP acceptance.

Today, the problem is no longer exclusive to VoIP subscribers. We are already seeing SPIT being received on traditional phone lines. Instead of going to open SIP ports, they are going to VoIP gateway providers sending calls to regular telephones. Have you ever received a call telling you to press 1 to lower your credit card bills? That's SPIT. They use low cost VoIP providers with stolen credit cards and BotNets to initiate the calls. Many of them are completely automated and collect the credit card numbers without having to talk to an agent.

This is only going to get worse in the near future. Unfortunately, there isn't much that traditional telcos can do to deal with it. They don't have the luxury of knowing the originating IP. They may be able to strong-arm the VoIP provider into cutting off customers that are sending SPIT, but that can be tricky and there will need to be some major changes to how telcos work and communicate with each other for this to actually happen.

If you have a true VoIP service which includes an open SIP port, the solution to this is fairly simple. Create a method to distinguish legitimate callers from SPIT. This can be a combination of several things including vocal captchas, a database of IP addresses (known good or known bad), access codes, and a method for users to report SPIT.

• A "vocal captcha" would be a string of numbers that the caller will have to enter. It can even include some basic math: "Johnny has 3 apples and 5 oranges, take away 2 apples and 3 oranges, how many apples does he have left?"
• Once a caller has passed the captcha, their IP will be entered into the IP address whitelist. The next time they call, they won't be presented with a captcha. If they fail the captcha repeadedly, they would go into a blacklist. These can be shared in a similar manner to how spam blacklists are maintained today.
  
• Access codes can be given to individual callers so they can bypass the captcha. These would be unique and revocable.
• If all of the above fails and a user still gets a SPIT call, they will enter a star code to report it. They will also have an option in their voicemail prompts to report SPIT.

The sooner we get this done, the sooner we'll be able to use VoIP properly, without having to rely on traditional phone companies. At Indosoft, we're working on implementing some of these features into our products. Many of them (like the captchas) may be difficult for users to accept, but it won't be long before they're easier to accept than the SPITstorm. We're spending a fair amount of time for R&D on this and we suspect many other VoIP product companies are as well. We expect there will be a competitive advantage to providers (business and residential) who offer this service as it is unlikely that tradtional telcos will be able or willing to offer this level of SPIT protection.