Setting up Managed Hosted Contact Center Service

The expansion and evolution of managed hosted data services and SIP trunking has contributed to the growth of call center as a service. Businesses want to avoid capital investment in purchasing customer premise technology platforms to run their call center software. The cost of managing such sophisticated infrastructure is not cheap. The new generation telecom providers who provide SIP trunks and internet services are eagerly capitalizing on this opportunity to offer ACD and Dialer solutions to expand into call center services. The hosted data center providers also see this as a chance to expand into a new service area and offer contact centers on demand. 

There are many factors in play that are influencing the rapid movement towards call center as a service. The acceptance of VoIP has lead to the confluence of voice and data being in the same pipeline. The growth and proliferation of Asterisk has opened up opportunities for managed services to deploy multi-tenant call center software in a hosted environment. Asterisk is a superior new generation telephony software that has aided the proliferation and acceptance of SIP in contact centers. The availability of Asterisk based contact center software for multi-channel offering is changing the landscape of contact center industry. 

Q-Suite, the leading software for setting Asterisk based multi-tenant contact centers, provides a rich  feature set out of the box. The completeness of contact center platform functionality is stunning. It is greatly aided by the underlying technology stack of Asterisk, Linux, MySQL and Apache. From ACD with skills based routing to Predictive Dialer, it provides all the features expected of an advanced call center software.  The essentials like Live and Historical reports, Voice Recording, Remote Agents and Web services API are all available within a multi-tenant offering. Q-Suite scales to multiple Asterisk servers seamlessly to accommodate growth. To top it all, Q-Suite offers High Availability and Call Survival for mission critical call centers.

A hosted multi-tenant contact center for Asterisk based on Q-Suite is a cost effective strategy to establish managed contact center services and compete with the offerings available from large legacy contact center technology firms. Its flexibility and rich functionality has made it the contact center platform of choice for Asterisk driven call centers.

Handling Web Leads through ACD Skills based Routing

Web lead generation through Internet is an important source for customer acquisition. It is critical to assign these leads to suitably skilled agents for callback at the earliest available opportunity. Advanced call center ACD software with skills based routing  provide Web services API that allow the leads to be inserted into queues for callback through Skills based Routing.

These callback queues with skills association behave like inbound queues. The ACD will map agents to queues based on agent skill-set and skill-level. The callbacks for Web leads will go to the highest skilled agent available. This routing can be optimized by designing skills and skill levels to suit the business requirements of call routing. This unified queuing technique is also used for other media integration like Chat and E-Mail as well.

For a Change hear this out

A man started walking down the Street

He wasn't watching where he put his feet!

He stepped into a puddle

And became all muddled

And tried to clean his feet

Walked straight into a tree

His neck hurt and he had to burp

His head hurt and he started to smirk

As I said, he was very muddled

And he was checked into multiple mental hospitals.

By Indhu Iyengar

Modern technology stack drives faster Call Center Software development

Modern contact center platforms are built on top of powerful technology stack. The underlying stack makes it simpler for the developers of call center software to focus on the building functionality around the two main aspects of voice customer contact, namely the Dialer and the ACD Engine. I am not ignoring the growth in the use of social media and chat within inbound centers for live customer contact. A good ACD should treat be able to all media types and queue them in a similar fashion using skills based routing and queue prioritization.

A look at the modern technology stack available for a contact center platform reveals the extent to which technology stack can impact the architecture of the platform. Operating systems like Linux with its networking tool-sets make it is possible to offer a distributed setup labelled as the Cloud Contact Center. Both the machine and human resources associated with such an operation can be distributed. The growth of VoIP and proliferation of SIP has taken the mystery out of telecom turn-ups and inter-connectivity. The availability of MySQL and Apache has revolutionized database and Web driven interface. Above all, the advent of a powerful hybrid PBX in the form of Asterisk has taken over the complete burden of the underlying telephony platform.

Now, the developers of Call Center Software have only to focus on the functional aspect of Dialer and ACD engine development. It is granted that the expectation from the end-user is a lot higher but this is more due to the maturity of the customer contact center operations as well as the economic pressures of productivity. The availability of feature-rich call center software for Asterisk telephony driven by the technology stack on Linux, MySQL and Apache has contributed greatly to the growth of Cloud and VoIP.

Web services API for Integrating into a Dialer and ACD software

Dialer and ACD are an integral part of every customer contact operation. Contact Centers require an ACD to control and manage incoming call flow. They may require a Dialer to perform List based dialing in predictive, preview or progressive mode.

Asterisk is a well know hybrid PBX ideally suited for building Customer Contact Technology Platform. Q-Suite is the leading Contact Center ACD and Dialer software suite for Asterisk. Q-Suite can be deployed at-premise or in the Cloud and, can be used for an enterprise or as a multi-tenant platform.

Organizations may have existing applications and CRM as a part of their business operations and may require integration with Q-Suite ACD and Dialer database and software to easily move data in and out of the contact center suite in real-time.

Q-Suite 5.5 offers a Web Services API to allow external applications to effectively automate different aspects of the contact center operations. Q-suite Web Services API brings immediate benefit by simplifying access to Campaign Services, Lead management, Reporting and Data Transfer. Marketing campaigns using Q-Suite’s Predictive, Preview or Progressive Dialing modes can use real-time lead insertion and extraction web services, for immediate dialing and status integration into CRM applications. Inbound ACD Web services can provide Live Agent stats, Live Queue stats, Live Call flow stats and Call details. It can also provide real-time floor information for Live Dashboards and Workforce management.

These Web Services API, in conjunction with Q-Suite’s extensive API for CTI Integration, provide external applications with a comprehensive library that allows complete integration of the advanced ACD and Dialer functionality available for Asterisk.

Importance of Simplified API for CRM integration to ACD and Dialer

CRM drives sales by providing centralized customer and lead management with instant access to the history of each customer and prospect. Most CRM software offer up to date customer history on demand with access through the Web or desktop application. The power of lead management and CRM can be amplified by integration to a Dialer platform to improve efficiency and productivity. Most Dialers provide for different modes of dialing like Predictive, Preview and Progressive. ACD integration to CRM allows better management of incoming calls. The most important aspect of setting up CRM integration is the ability of Dialer and ACD software to work seamlessly with the CRM.

It is critical to review the API available for the integration of Dialer/ACD system to understand how well it can work with any CRM. There will be some overlap in functionality like real-time and historical management information between CRM and the Dialer/ACD platform.

Typically the API for integration of a Dialer/ACD platform with any CRM should present three broad sets of methods. The first set of API methods cover setup and account management of the sales or customer service workforce so that they can be setup using the existing CRM user management information without duplication. The second set of methods within the API for CRM integration will cover the requirements of the day to day management. The third set of methods will be CRM specific custom requirements. These are custom methods added by the Dialer/ACD software developers to address specific CRM needs.

The benefits of a successful integration of an ACD and Dialer software to a given CRM platform provides faster access and better customer reach thus differentiating the company in competitive situations.

Social Networking, Contact Center operations and Customer Satisfaction

You guessed it right. The new buzz in marketing is "Social Networking". It is interesting to see how technology providers are pursuing this buzz. We recently had Salesforce announcing acquisition of Radian6 to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversations within its CRM platform. Now Cisco has released a self-commisioned whitepaper on next generation contact centers conducted by Forrester. It mentions customer dissatisfaction as a key finding. We all deal with customer service for services like banking, insurance, phone plans, cable and internet. I have left out many more services. The general perception is that customers are left unsatisfied while dealing with customer service contact centers to resolve outstanding issues.

What can we do about it? This white paper talks about opening new channels of communication through social networking tools. I would rather that organizations setting up customer contact centers take some time to analyze the root cause of this less than stellar customer satisfaction.

Contact centers are the first level of interaction with the organization for most customers. Customer service representatives cannot resolve issues if they are saddled with many broken processes in the back-end. They should not be used as a buffering layer to shield management and process inadequacies. Companies should market products and services after installing adequate processes in place to handle all the customer service interactions.

Modern day contact center technology platforms come with very good tools for CTI integration to CRM, ERP and other customer applications driving the business. Contact centers running with good Dialer and ACD software can effectively integrate to all Web based and proprietary solutions in the back-end. It is not more and different channel types but effective processes that will ensure success of customer service. Front end call center representatives cannot be effective with broken back-end processes. Unhappy customers will eventually move on and the cost of bringing new customers might prove to be more expensive.