[Asterisk-Users] Turning AAAH into a call-center

[Matt Roth]

Kevin Savoy wrote:

>Speaking as one of those call centers we are looking at doing a turn over to
>Asterisk from our Nortel systems and are doing it ourselves. We've looked at
>a lot of packages from Fonality, Signate, Aheeva and others and none fit our
>needs. Each has good aspects but none have all of what we need. Below he
>states extensive reporting in QueueMetrics. Yes and no. Extensive but
>limited to a few areas. Agent level reporting doesn't go deep enough. There
>is no DNIS reporting. In our business that is critical. We have 40 to 50
>queues and some queues can have up to 1,000 toll free numbers pointed at it.
>Our clients want to know how many calls on each individual toll free and all
>the statistics that go with it. Talk time, abandons, thresholds, etc.
>  
>
Kevin,

We are in the process of moving our call center off of a Nortel Meridian 
switch and onto Asterisk.  We currently have 10 inbound queues running 
through Asterisk on a single server and yesterday we handled over 20,000 
calls.

We are using QueueMetrics to handle all of our reporting needs and our 
floor managers are happier with it than the Max reporting package used 
on the Nortel.  The developers are also very receptive to feedback and 
have been steadily shaping QueueMetrics to fit our needs.  If you are 
considering building your own queue reporting system, at least talk to 
the developers of QueueMetrics first.  The time and effort we have saved 
by using QueueMetrics has allowed us to focus on more important issues, 
like fine-tuning Asterisk itself.

We are also in the process of developing our Asterisk-based outbound 
calling architecture.  For a variety of reasons, it will be a more 
distributed architecture than our monolithic inbound environment.  We've 
been in contact with the developer of VICIDIAL, and it looks like it 
will suit our needs.

Feel free to contact me here or off-list if you'd like to discuss your 
transition to Asterisk.  It looks like you are headed down the same road 
we're on, so I might be able to help you avoid a few bumps.

Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer