On Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:45:50 +0530, Niyaz Ahmad <lists.ni...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello Friends, > > I need your suggestion for the following scenario. > > An e-commerce company, largely in tourism, has its own in-house 24x7 > customer support facility. > It provides support to its customers through phone and email. > > Its a 30-seats call-center, having only in-bound calls. > Presently they are using a Nortel based system which seems aging. > They have a 32-channel Reliance & MTNL PRI line (Reliance line is primary). > I don't know about the PRI-Card/Server. > The Nortel system provided a real time monitoring, call bargin and call > recording facilities. > Nortel system also provides detailed report of each call hitting their > lines. > The management demands a report based on these details on daily basis. > Each call center agent uses a Nortel based IP phone through which he/she > receives/mutes/unmutes/transfers calls. > The call center usually receives 5000-6000 calls everyday, which may reach > 9000 in peak seasons. > > I plan to propose an Asterisk based system for their call center. > I have never implemented/installed Ansterisk based system.
Asterisk can easily handle the call volume you've mentioned. I'm not sure how about the IVR setup in your existing setup, but you can have a pretty advanced IVR also implemented so that the users can get self service instead of talking to an agent. But, if you've not implemented Asterisk earlier, and intend to do it yourself, then it would be pretty challenging. Not sure about the timelines you're looking at, but maybe you can first start out with a normal asterisk setup and use it as a PBX without any hardware card. That will give you some experience in Asterisk. Later you can work on integrating it with an E1/PRI card. One option is using something like AsteriskNOW - http://www.asterisk.org/downloads - which gives you a GUI. But to learn the intricacies, I'd always prefer you install from source and run it inside a virtual machine to test it. > While contemplating Asterisk as a potential candidate, I assume: > 1) The company would need to buy a linux supported PRI card (I guess its > called FXO card). > 2) Call-center agents can use Soft IP phones on a linux based pc which will > allow call barging/transfer/recording. > 3) Asterisk can provide facilities of call barging, call transfer, call > recording and detailed report of each landing call. Your assumptions are correct. The card that you'd need to purchase would be http://www.digium.com/en/products/digital/ - try getting hardware Echo Cancellation in built unless your service provider recommends otherwise. Apart from Digium, Sangoma also sell these cards and they're considered more reliable. Recording capabilities can easily be integrated as well as transfer and barging. You'd need call queues in asterisk so that calls are distributed to agents smoothly and rest of them remain on hold (e.g. via IVR). Soft phones could be used; but usually hard phones are more reliable as they're not dependent on machine configuration and random hardware issues. You'd require a hard phone which supports SIP. Though you can start with a soft-phone too in the initial stages and see the response. On a Linux workstation, though there are a number of softphones available but many are not that reliable. I prefer Zoiper, but sometimes that also creates issues. The other option is X-Lite. For reporting, of course you'd require "realtime" which integrates asterisk with MySQL. You'd require that to be integrated with an Asterisk billing setup which provides reporting, or develop it yourself. You can have a look at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+billing > I have the following queries: > 1) Are my assumptions correct? > 2) What hardware (configuration) would be required for this kind of load? > 3) Please suggest hardware requirement for call recording separately. > 4) Is there any IT company in Delhi that can implement and provide 24x7 > support to this > Asterisk based setup. I don't see the load to be significant. If you've 30 agents at any single point of time, a 2 port PRI/E1 card should do, as you can have an added IVR also setup (and of course 2 PRI lines). Otherwise you can go for a single port card. A fairly recent Xeon server with 10K RPM disk should do you well. Try not to run it in a virtualization environment for production use, though if properly implemented, that should also work. Usually in virtualization environment, the resources are over-committed and if multiple asterisk servers are at full load then it could create issues. Earlier there were timing issues depending of what virtualization software were you using due to which specifically conferencing didn't work well. These are not that prevalent as of now (tried kvm & xen ; but not in a loaded production environment). For call recording, you can initially save on the same disk and move it to a different storage infrastructure (such as SATA) periodically via NFS (maybe at the end of the day). For such call volumes you'd not face much issues, but you may also implement a RAM disk so there's no bottleneck due to disk writing. What will be time consuming for you is the transcoding which happens while recording. More CPU and RAM always help. But with only 30 agents, you should not face any issues. http://voip-info.org is your friend. Regards Vivek Kapoor http://exain.com _______________________________________________ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
