Andrés Herreiz, founder of Quarea, speaks about the future of call-center market in this new interview for the Loway blog

My name is Andrés Herreiz and I was born, live and work in Barcelona, Spain. I have a Telecom Engineer degree from UPC (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, 1995). With my partner Lluís Riera we founded QUAREA in 2003. Now I'm a full time entrepreneur focused on improving and promoting our company. We are specialized in VoIP solutions for SMB and Enterprise Spanish market, based on Asterisk. Formerly I was working as Account Manager in Intermec Technologies (1996 to 2001) and Cable and Wireless (2001 to 2003).

Could you please summarize for our readers your company profile, your target customer and reference markets?
QUAREA was founded with the target to supply quality IT services and solutions, mainly in VoIP area. Nowadays we are a leading provider for Asterisk IP PBX solutions and advanced contact center systems. Our portfolio includes traditional hardware on site solutions and virtual or cloud based solutions. Our customers are SMB or Enterprise companies from very different sectors. We are proud to work for large companies like Indra, Leroy Merlin, Elecnor, Alstom...

What kind of benefits do you experience using and selling Queuemetrics and WombatDialer?
An ACD with Queuemetrics is always a key component of our Asterisk solution proposal for any kind of company, not only call centers. We are also Queuemetrics and WombatDialer users in our Customer Care and Sales departments. Our vision is that Queuemetrics and WombatDialer are valuable and profitable tools for improve productivity and quality of telephony service in some key business processes, especially for companies that value their customers. If we also note that QueueMetrics is easy to install, use and maintain then we can guarantee that our customers will be satisfied.

Could you give an example of how you have dealt with a customers critical issue using QueueMetrics or WombatDialer?
Two years ago, the board of an important professional association of lawyers in Barcelona received many complaints related with a poor quality on phone service. They contacted with us and we had the opportunity to audit the telephony system and propose them to improve the system configuring their two Asterisk servers with an ACD for a hundred users per server, installing and configuring Queuemetrics with a call recording system. We won the project and it was an immediate success. Last year they have been improving their internal processes increasing productivity and quality and now they are working to integrate VoIP with their CRM using Queuemetrics CTI.

What are the key factors witch make a successful Asterisk based call-center?
Asterisk has a rich and flexible feature set similar to other traditional IP PBX solutions like Avaya or Cisco, but infrastructure requirements for Asterisk can be very scalable and cost effective, not only for the Open Source nature of the application, but also for using general purpose computers or virtual servers and other open technologies.

Mr. Herreiz, What's your view on the Asterisk call-center industry future in the next two years?
I'm very optimistic. Asterisk, more than a classic IP PBX, is an application server and QueueMetrics and WombatDialer can convert it in a powerful and cost effective tool for call centers. The Asterisk Community has nowadays very good health and can guarantee a fast product evolution and new features. For example, you have the new Asterisk versions supporting WebRTC, probably a killer application for next year.