Asterisk Predictive Dialer for Your Outbound Call Center

Predictive Dialers are used by outbound call centers to keep their call center agents talking on the phone. Indosoft has recently upgraded its predictive dialer technology based on open source Asterisk.

It can provide live connects within 10 to 15 seconds from the time an agent wraps up a call. In order to achieve this, a predictive dialer has to dial more phone numbers than the anticipated number of agents available to answer the calls, should the calls be picked up. Generally when a call is picked up and there are no available agents to answer the call, it gets dropped and the person on the other end does not hear an agent. The FCC in United States and the CRTC in Canada have strict guidelines governing dropped calls. Indosoft's predictive dialer technology is designed to be compliant with these guidelines so that the predictive dialer drops less than 3% of the total number of calls connected, excluding answering machines. The PBX running the predictive dialer is expected to play a recorded message announcing the dropped call with details in conformity with the regulation.

Predictive dialers are computer algorithms that decide how many phone numbers the PBX should dial out, for a given number of agents. The optimization in the predictive dialing algorithm tries to determine the number of connects at any given time. The parameters are generally a function of the quality of leads, the time of day and the immediate statistical past. Predictive Dialers with tone detection to identify Busy, No-Answer and other call terminations do not have high degree of accuracy in identifying the call termination. Asterisk provides TDM and VoIP termination options that come with Digital signaling essential for reliable and fast detection. Asterisk has a CTI capable TCP based Manager Interface. A good session manager for any call center software should use this interface to manage the predictive dialing algorithm.

This advanced predictive dialer is tightly integrated with Asterisk and is a sub-component of the telephony and CRM of Indosoft's outbound contact center technology. Asterisk PBX is a full featured open source Enterprise PBX software that dramatically reduces the cost of building any large call center using its wonderful telephony platform. At very little cost, it provides all essential functionality required for an enterprise call center. The Digium Quad PRI (T1) boards are good quality TDM interface at extremely low cost. Digium-Asterisk will become the dominating platform for contact center industry in years to come.

Indosoft Inc. has many successful deployments of its predictive dialer in contact center industry today. Indosoft is a Digium Asterisk partner and provides fully blended solutions for Contact Centers, Audio Conferencing Bridge, Real-time call blocking for Do Not Call list enforcement, Hosted PBX, IVR and Recording.