Question about using Asterisk for Virtual Call Center..

[abuehrlen]

Hello,

I am starting a virtual call center and am currently trying to figure out which hardware and software components I will need. I have doing some research via goolge and asking around. I'm wondering if Asterisk would be ideal for my Business? If not I am looking for suggestions. I dont have any phone equipment as of yet and was looking for input since I am hoping to have most of my employees connect via a vpn and soft phone of some sort to take calls remotely. There will be a few people in the office who may be taking some calls however mainly just monitoring and coaching. Any Suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank You

Angelo Buehrlen

[abuehrlen]

Any Suggestions at all would be helpful. I am talking to clients and need to get my equipment and software setup. I realize I am going to need to customize some settings to work with the client but I am really just trying tofigure out what software and hardware would be cost effective and easy to use for startup.

[jpsharp]

For a simple call center where agents just answered ringing phones, Asterisk by itself would work beautifully. The complexity comes in if you start wanting agent interactions with something like screen population based on the incoming call or want outbound calling systems.

A basic call center would be Asterisk running with Queues talking to IP phones of somesort either Soft phones running on a PC or hard phones like Polycom or Cisco IP phones. As far as VPN goes, you can run something like OpenVPN on the endpoints or get wild & crazy with a Cisco VPN solutions.