Pete Engler, Asterisk Marketing Manager at Digium speaks about the Asterisk call-center industry present and future.

2015-01-12

Pete Engler Pete Engler is the Channel and Asterisk Marketing Manager at Digium. He joined the company in 2008 as the Product Manager for Asterisk hardware products before moving to Marketing. Prior to Digium, he served as a Product Manager in the Enterprise and SMB teams with Avocent Corporation, Applications Engineering at ADTRAN and 10 years in Information Technology as a Desktop and Network Administrator. As Channel and Asterisk Marketing Manager, Pete is responsible for channel marketing and lead gen programs for Digium's worldwide network of partners, as well as marketing campaigns that continue to drive demand for Digium's portfolio of telephony products, including Switchvox Unified Communications phone systems and Switchvox Cloud; and products for custom communications projects with open source Asterisk.

Q: Could you summarize for our readers your company profile, your target customer and reference market?
Digium, Inc., the Asterisk Company, created and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony software. Since its founding in 1999 by Mark Spencer, Digium has become the open source alternative to proprietary communication providers, with offerings that cost as much as 80 percent less. Digium offers Asterisk software free to the open source community and offers Switchvox, Digium's Unified Communications solution to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses. The company's product line includes a wide range of telephony hardware and software to enable resellers and customers to implement turnkey VoIP systems or to design their own custom communications solutions.

Q: Mr. Engler, what's your view on the Asterisk call-center industry future in the next two years?
The call center industry continues to be a growing market and a very important part of many businesses worldwide. Businesses that rely on any form of call center, large or small, understand customer service is a key to customer acquisition and retention. Research concludes 86% of customers quit doing business with a company based on a bad experience. It is very important that a call center work efficiently and the agents are armed with tools and resources to provide the highest degree of customer service. The solutions built on Asterisk offer a cost effective and stable platform to run the telecommunications needs of any call center.

Q: What kind of benefits do you experience with the QueueMetrics and Asterisk integration?
One of the key portions of the call center infrastructure is the telecommunications platform, which must be able to efficiently handle the calls and routing to available agents. While I haven't personally used the QueueMetrics platform, it does allow the call center staff to view a host of important metrics to ensure the call center and agents are working as efficient as possible. Armed with this information, processes can be refined in order to offer the best customer experience possible.

Q: What are the key factors which make a successful Asterisk based call-centre?
Business that utilize call centers, whether part of the business itself or outsourced, are reliant on uptime and efficiency of the supporting infrastructure. Asterisk communications framework is a solid foundation to build a call center telecommunications platform. Since Asterisk is a framework, a custom solution can be built based on the needs of the individual call center. Utilizing other call center packages, such as QueueMetrics, allow more information to be provided to agents, analyze how efficiently the center is working or can uncover areas for process improvement.

Q: What are your thoughts about present and future strategic role of Asterisk call-center analysis softwares in our market?
I believe analysis software would be extremely beneficial to every person working in a call center, from the center's management to the individual agents. The ability to provide key information to agents and view a wide range of metrics in the day-to-day operation of agents and the center is vitally important in building a world class-call center.


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