As many of you know we have been working diligently on a new contact center ACD solution called openACD to replace the currently existing ACD application in openUC / sipXecs. We are making rapid progress and it is time to give you a sneak peek into what is coming. There is a lot of excitement about openACD as it holds the promise of becoming a highly flexible, scalable and resilient contact center solution. openACD is one of these next generation contact center solutions that is media agnostic and allows queuing lots of things, including basic calls, voicemail messages, email and at some point instant messages (IM) or even FAX. It is skills based and offers priority queuing implementing rules that look at different criteria for incoming messages.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Contact center ACD solution with skills based routing, priority and unified queuing, openUC / sipXecs integration for Web administration, supervisor interface for managing agents and call flow, and detailed CDR recording.
- Agents now have the flexibility to transfer calls, using an agent Web UI, in a variety of ways; something that was not possible with our old ACD. Agents can transfer a call back into queue, or into another queue, or to another agent, or they can do an attended warm transfer to an external number. All these transfers can be tracked for historic reporting.
- Callers can press star '*' while in queue and leave a voicemail instead of staying in queue. The voicemail message then stays in queue and is presented to an agent. The agent can then decide to either call the caller back or respond in a different way if the caller's contact information is available. The voicemail is treated with lower priority and put at the end of the queue by default, but that could be configurable at some point so as to maintain position in the queue.
- openACD can queue email and such incoming email messages are presented to agents over a Web UI. As with calls there is a wrap-up time that applies to responding to an email.
- Supervisors have a lot of flexibility and different ways to intervene, including transfer calls to a particular agent, send them to voicemail, listen in on a call including whisper and barge. If emails are in queue supervisors can view the email including mark it as spam. Call recording is supported, although we will have to improve on recording granularity a bit. The supervisors can also move agents between profiles to balance load across clients/departments during a call volume spike. There's also support for the supervisor to record an outage message to be played as part of the IVR.
- Agents can be remote either as remote workers connected to the system over SIP, or using an external phone connected to the PSTN. Care needs to be taken so that calls do not ring out to voicemail systems outside the call center environment.
One of the most exciting aspects of openACD is the possibility to achieve significant scale and redundancy. Some more work will be required in this area, but here is the basic concept: Several openACD nodes can be setup as part of an openUC / sipXecs system, all centrally managed and part of the cluster. Queues can span more than one node and accept calls from any node and deliver to an agent on any node. Queues are global to the cluster by default but can also be split and then merged again. This is useful to establish redundancy in case connectivity is lost between nodes or to scale a queue to include several servers. When a queue is split it continues to operate with its own version of the queue containing only the calls present on that node. The queue can then be merged again later, combining the calls.
Early performance and scalability tests are very promising with a range of different results. We will publish results once we are a bit further along in testing. If you have results to share let us know.
openACD is available in our developer builds and you can participate in the testing effort. A first official release will be included in the openUC / sipXecs 4.6 release. If you are a company with a need for a cost-effective contact center and would like to work with us, now is the time to influence the direction we are taking with this.
And finally, I'd like to thank everyone involved, in particular the openACD team Andrew and Micah, the KGB team without whom this would not have been possible, as well as the team here at eZuce. We are very excited about this new capability added to openUC / sipXecs and we are looking forward to sharing more details soon.
