Skype contact centre interoperability
As an Altitude Software partner, contact centre technologies service provider, Ocular Technologies has introduced Skype for Asterisk, a new interaction channel built in with the Altitude IP Contact Center solution, which will enable contact centres to take advantage of the unified interaction channel monitoring, reporting and development environment.
According to Ebrahim Dinat, sales and marketing director at Ocular Technologies, this will give organisations the opportunity to connect with approximately 480 million Skype users worldwide in an efficient and widely available way. “Contact centres can use the new functionalities to set up ‘global toll free’ numbers and provide effective managed support and service to customers making Skype calls,” he explains.
According to the Allot MobileTrends: Global Mobile Broadband Traffic Report, during the second half of 2009, Skype led the VoIP traffic market and accounted for 77 percent of the global VoIP bandwidth, while the use of instant messaging applications increased significantly by almost 47 percent. What’s more, the EMEA region posted 70 percent growth in broadband traffic.
“Contact centres need to be aware of these trends and ensure that they derive business benefit from every opportunity that arises,” Dinat continues. “In a time of virtual ubiquity, with people communicating through both voice channels and the web via chat rooms, blogs and social networking, contact centres must do more to provide customers with open channels to interact 24/7.
“The ease and simplicity of dialling a company centre using a Skype ID, from any Skype client, will surely attract many users, while the ability to intelligently route and manage these calls inside the enterprise will appeal to a number of companies,” he says.
The software solution operates on the Altitude vBox communications platform, a supported SIP server that allows SIP and ISDN connectivity in contact centres, running on top of Asterisk and Digium ISDN boards. Altitude IP Contact Center is a complete contact centre suite, which includes flexible inbound and powerful outbound dialling algorithms, call classification, unified supervising, universal queue and built-in routing, and enables organisations to operate mixed environments.
