Hi, I am investigating possibility of using asterisk as an call center controller, i.e. Clients phone in, interact with IVR, if IVR is not enough get redirected to human consultant. There should be possibility for supervisors to connect to ongoing conversation. Expected traffic will not exceed 30 concurrent calls. Asterisk box should be connected to Siemens "communication platform" HiPath 3750 that controls whole telephony system. This Siemens has ISDN and VOIP(H323 as I have been told) interfaces. Now my problem is which interface to choose? Will voip be good enough? Wont it introduce to much latency? Or should I insist on buying ISDN interface for asterisk box? What hardware would You recommend for this setup? Another question: anyone has successfully deployed call center solution using soft phones? If yes, with which soft phones? Maciek Kaminski
Maciek Kaminski wrote:> Hi, > I am investigating possibility of using asterisk as an call center > controller, i.e. Clients phone in, interact with IVR, if IVR is not > enough get redirected to human consultant. There should be possibility > for supervisors to connect to ongoing conversation. Expected traffic > will not exceed 30 concurrent calls. > > Asterisk box should be connected to Siemens "communication platform" > HiPath 3750 that controls whole telephony system. This Siemens has ISDN > and VOIP(H323 as I have been told) interfaces. > > Now my problem is which interface to choose? Will voip be good enough? > Wont it introduce to much latency? Or should I insist on buying ISDN > interface for asterisk box? What hardware would You recommend for this > setup?VOIP will always give more latency than than an isdn interface. However we have an entirely voip based system (for internal calls) and the latency isn't noticeable.> > Another question: anyone has successfully deployed call center solution > using soft phones? If yes, with which soft phones? >Our (very small, 3 agents) call centre uses all softphones. We currently use x-lite but are looking at iaxcomm to intergrate the phone with the CRM software. I'm happy with the setup but have been having some intermittent faults with incoming calls recently that I believe may be a problem with the quadbri card we use. Hope this helps - anyone out there with a larger setup willing to comment? regards, Julien
Hi!> > enough get redirected to human consultant. There should be possibility > > for supervisors to connect to ongoing conversation. Expected traffic > > will not exceed 30 concurrent calls.Look at "ZapBarge" for the listening-in. As usual the Wiki is your friend. Also I assume you'll want to look at this: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Astguiclient By the way: If you can do give Asterisk a life of its own with an E1 ISDN card and do not put it behind the Siemens HiPath, that'll make things easier. That would permit you to avoid the rather evil H.323 protocol ...> > Now my problem is which interface to choose? Will voip be good enough? > > Wont it introduce to much latency? Or should I insist on buying ISDN > > interface for asterisk box? What hardware would You recommend for this > > setup?Before ordering any equipment you should first of all test the H.323 setup/connectivity between HiPath and Asterisk. Cheers, Philipp