Viva Digitally

Contact centre platform – Asterisk won’t cut the ice!

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July 9, 2024 by viva

We come across customers many a times, who talk about:
  • the need for quality in their customer interactions
  • how important it is for them to retain existing customers
  • how important it is for them to improve profitability of their customer relationship
However, when it comes to technology they look at cheaper open-source solutions in the market to drive their customer interactions.
Most likely, they would be using asterisk-based dialers to handle their customer interactions. Some of them even have 100s of seats running on Asterisk dialers. Once they realize that it is becoming difficult to run their operations, they keep adding technical and support resources to manage and maintain the open source system, for it is not built to handle such loads. The kind of skills needed include knowledge of IP networking, system administration, traditional telephony, scripting language, working with APIs,
While the dialer is open source and it comes cheap, overheads are plenty, inefficiencies are plenty and after a point, you will have nowhere to hide. While Asterisk is just an engine, what the enterprises need is the complete vehicle.

Some of the key challenges in an asterisk-based customer service operation include:

  • It is a dialer and not a contact center platform. So, any kind of integration will be a humungous task and most often than not, it is just impossible
  • Asterisk can be set up to address enterprise contact center needs to some extent. Probably, you should be able to handle up to 400 users with an Asterix system. However, the major drawbacks are its maintainability and deployment time.
  • Customer wants to contact you through his/her preferred channel – email, SMS, WhatsApp, Social, phone, or website. However, that becomes an issue with Asterisk dialers, as they don’t support it without extensive integrations
  • Delayed problem diagnosis as the information is not available in real-time and resolutions aren’t provided in real-time
  • The possibilities of cross-selling and up-selling is near-zero, unless the agent is super talented
  • There aren’t any features to provide self-service options to end-users
  • Absolutely no intelligence built into the system to let you do your jobs smarter. Agents don’t have access to customer information, past customer interactions, and service history among others
Most customers that we talk to claim that they use the dialer only for outbound calling. They have most data points that they need and they don’t have to bother about integrations.
How can you run an organization that serves B2B customers without providing options for your customers to reach you?
It is time that you move away from your Asterisk-based dialer and look at an enterprise solution that really functions as a contact center platform. This would allow you to acquire customers faster and help you retain them better.
After all, a 5% increase in customer loyalty can increase profits by up to 95% and the cost of acquiring new customers is 5 to 25 times more than retaining existing ones. [Source: Harvard Business Review].
Retaining customers hence becomes critical to every business and customer retention strategy is important to not only reduce customer churn but also to drive revenues.
If you are struggling with an Asterisk infrastructure, it is definitely time for you to move on.