moulding and shaping asterisk for any size business

MOULDING AND SHAPING ASTERISKANTONY RUSSELLTECHNICAL DIRECTOR

ROGER MILLIGANOPERATIONS DIRECTOR

BEGINNING CLAROTECH’S ASTERISK RELATIONSHIP

First heard of Asterisk in early 2005

Triggered by a customer request

First asterisk server was

a 3GHz Pentium 4, 1 GB RAM, 160GB disk

running Asterisk 1.0

30 call center users

Asterisk 1.2 released on 21 November 2005 !

THE EXCITEMENT OF ASTERISK

Initially had no idea what we could do with it

Had to find a mentor

The light bulb moment when we understood the dialplan

Have you ever seen grown men smile when a telephone rings

WHY DID WE PERSEVERE?

Every time we poked something a new set of possibilities appeared

Our strong Linux and Development skills made a perfect match

Telephony is so much fun

Fitted perfectly into the Clarotech bespoke philosophy

Functionality

Flexibility

Reliability

SHIFT*EIGHT

Clarotech introduces shift*eight as a brand

Wanted to put an identity on our Asterisk philosophy

Never two of the same

shift*eight is not a server

Shift*eight is a combination of hardware, software, skills and support

Danger that it is too customizable

BAD IMPLEMENTATIONS

Bad asterisk implementations have given Asterisk a bad reputation

Too many people putting asterisk on the spare PC

Too many implementations on inadaquate networks

So difficult to recover from poor call quality experience

STANDARDS GIVE US THE EDGE

Never use the spare PC

Plenty of CPU headroom, plenty of threads

Number of CPU cores dictates the number of concurrent calls

The network must be up to the task

THE SAB CAMPAIGN

PoC 2006

Rugby World Cup 2007

THE EVOLUTION OF TELEPHONY DATA

Clarotech Consulting (Pty) Ltd

CDR

ANSWERED

NO ANSWER

FAILED

BUSY

TMS BILLING ALERTSTEXT DB



CDR TEXT ANALYSIS MONITORING

* .log



CDR

* .log

QueueLog

CALLOUTBOUND

CONNECT

ENTERQUEUE

RINGNOANSWER

ABANDON

COMPLETEAGENT

COMPLETECALLER

TRANSFER

ADDMEMBER

PAUSE

PAUSEALL

UNPAUSE

REMOVEMEMBER

TEXT DB REPORTING LIVE CUSTOM



CDR STORAGE INDEXING

* .log

QueueLog

Recordings

ARCHIVE QA ??



CDR

* .log

SIP

QueueLog

Recordings

TEXT ANALYSIS

SMALL ASTERISK IMPLEMENTATIONS

Single server Asterisk systems – Asterisk PBXs

Easy to do an OK job, but we want to do a great job 100s of times

Its all about consistency

Good server hardware

Better network infrastructure

Knowing how many concurrent calls you can handle

SCALING THE ASTERISK PBX

Standard PBX server must support

Asterisk

Database Server

Web browser

Other maintenance tasks

How many concurrent calls can you run on a single server?

Running one site using two (or more) asterisk servers

CLAROVOICE

Clarotech’s venture into switching calls

Logical move

Quality over Quantity

Now switching almost 2 million minutes per month

VIRTUAL PBXS (VPBX)

Multi-tenant vs discrete servers

CALL CENTRES

How do you spread the work over many servers

Easiest is to partition into silos

Server for Sales

Server for Customer Care

etc.

Then it is easy as implementing a whole bunch of single server

VERY BIG CALL CENTRES

Running one site using two (or more) Asterisk servers

How do you share queues across multiple asterisk servers?

Leverage off virtualization

Largest implementation (ViciDial)

Five asterisk servers

Three web servers with load balancer

Two MySQL servers using replication

JOURNEY


CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT CHANNELS

►V►

T

F►

D►

►F

►S►

►O

2 320 agentsFinancial Services

►E►

►D►

Years ► ► ►


►O

FAX PROCESSOR


►F►

FAX PROCESSOR ► DOCUMENT PROCESSOR


►O

►F►

JOURNEY

DATA

INTEGRATION

AGILITY




CDR

* .log

SIP

QueueLog

Recordings

Dialer

DATA - WALLBOARD

DATA - DIALER ANALYSIS & OPTIMISATION


DATA - CUSTOM REPORTING & ANALYSIS


DATA


Post-Call Surveys

Data Mining

Machine Learning

Best Time to Call

WFM

INTEGRATION

Core Systems, Back Office and 3rd Party Applications

Screen Pops

API, DB, URL, AMI, AGI

Realtime | Batch | Bi-directional


AGILITY - INTELLIGENT DIALER

Contactability

Call Times

Redial

Alternative numbers

Optimisation

Dial efficiencies

Talk Time (Wait vs Drop)

Blended

Configuration & Customisation



TELEPHONY

TE

moulding and shaping asterisk for any size business

Technology