AstriCon 2009, Building a Distributed Call Center

Every year that AstriCon has existed, I have presented or at least helped organize, and this year is no exception. I will be presenting on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 from 10:00am to 10:35am in the Carrier/Call Center track. I will be the first presenter of the day hoping to give you lots of information about using Asterisk as a call center platform.

More information about my talk is here: http://www.astricon.net/confDescriptions.aspx?t=CC#CC-01

Over the last year or so I’ve been building a distributed call center based on Asterisk 1.4. However, there are some additional tools and features that make the task easier in the new 1.6.x builds of Asterisk, and I’ll be discussing them and showing some of the configuration options to get you going. Because I only have 35 mins of total talk time, I’ll be discussing a lot of technical and logical topics quickly, so the presentation most likely won’t be for the faint of heart.

Since I’m the first one in the track, I will try to give a brief, low-level overview of call centers in general, along with the traditional method of running a call center, versus the freedom a distributed call center gives you, and some of the technical challenges involved in that, and how to overcome them.

Hopefully you can make it to AstriCon. I’ve been to a number of conferences, and as someone who is technical who doesn’t enjoy the pitches of sales engineers as talks because I rarely get anything out of it (since I’m not there to purchase thousands of dollars of equipment), I absolutely love what AstriCon provides. From higher level talks for business associates to down-and-dirty talks on how to implement and design complex solutions with Asterisk, the conference has it all. It’s a truly unique conference where the business manager, the sales associate, and the network engineer can all come together and leave with increased knowledge about a powerful phone system that could potentially save their company thousands of dollars a year (or day!).

Hope to see you there!