Aheeva

Asterisk-managed Call Centers: Leveraging Digium's Asterisk to compete in outsourcing

Overview

Montreal-based Aheeva, is a specialist in developing and managing Interactive Business Solutions for Contact Centers. Aheeva provides businesses and contact centers with the tools required to increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs and increase revenues.

In 2003, the company considered launching a spin-off company that would provide contact center outsourcing services including technical support, sales, newspaper and cable TV subscriptions services, among others. At the time, Aheeva did not have a call center and worked with very expensive, high-end, proprietary, hardware-based Lucent Genesis PBXs. The company was struggling to find contracts where they could deliver a fast return on investment.

Using its vast expertise in evaluating and recommending different call center technologies, Aheeva was in a position to compare different solutions and implement a best-of-breed call center solution.

Challenge

Aheeva's objective was to offer competitive prices. However, it realized quickly that the existing solutions in the market were expensive and would not offer the flexibility required. At first glance, the start-up expense of setting up a call center (based on a proprietary PBX solution) would have cost close to $2 million. Additionally, many companies were finding out that once an expensive standard PBX solution is implemented, it is not customizable, does not provide the level of support needed, and there is often little they could do to improve it.

Solution

In March of 2003, Aheeva discovered Asterisk, the open source PBX/telephony application for Linux. After researching and thoroughly evaluating the application's features and capabilities, Aheeva decided to adopt Asterisk technology in order to develop a call center solution (predictive dialer and quality monitoring tools) to implement in its new Atelka call center.

Implementation

Aheeva needed to simplify the configuration and administration of the existing Asterisk dial plan (Asterisk normally uses text-based configuration files to handle this). Additionally, Aheeva had to expand the ability of Asterisk to handle load balancing over an array of multiple Asterisk servers and switches, without losing track of the channel in which each individual call resides. This improved Asterisk's quick deployment and scalability.

AGI, or Asterisk Gateway Interface, is patterned after the Web's Common Gateway Interface so that the programmer can use his or her favorite programming language to create Asterisk applications, then communicate with Asterisk through STDOUT, receiving Asterisk's response through STDIN.

In the process of adding new features to Asterisk and testing its limits at the time, Aheeva discovered and fixed two bugs within the Asterisk code that show up when you scale it to installations of this size. They submitted patches back to the community, which was well benefited.

Results

In November 2003, Aheeva launched Atelka, a 55-seat call center with full Inbound and Outbound capabilities and other applications such full digital recording, reporting and online management tools. The call center created a new line of revenue for the company. Furthermore, Aheeva was able to dramatically increase the number of contracts they were able to pursue and win. The company's new list of happy customers received the benefit of a reliable technology and a huge cost savings that Aheeva was able to pass along to them. Aheeva now continues to grow its consulting arm adding to its 25 new employees, including 15 engineers. By September 2005, Atelka will exceed 500 call center employees providing a wide range of services.

Asterisk has provided Aheeva with a high level of quality, as well as the ability to customize and upgrade inexpensively. Aheeva now competes with both the quality of big telecom companies, as well as the price of call centers in low-wage areas like India, Pakistan, and South America, saving their money on hardware and software instead of wages.