What is AACC?
AACC (short for Advanced Asterisk Call Center) will be a complete call center solution for the Asterisk PBX, capable of handling inbound and outbound campaigns. Agents will enjoy a toolbar for computer telephony integration. Managers will have an administration panel that will allow them to control every aspect of the call center.
It is entirely written in Java, which makes it OS independent. For small size call centers, AACC can easily share the same server with Asterisk.
Campaigns
AACC will have the ability to handle both inbound and outbound campaigns. Agents will be able to work as inbound, outbound, or in "blended" mode (i.e. both inbound and outbound).
AACC adds an agent toolbar, used for computer telephony integration (CTI).
Oubound campaigns will be dialed predictively. Agents can also set themselves in manual mode, for preview or manual dialing.
AACC handles multiple campaigns, both for agent handling, or just IVR campaigns (for announcements, reminders, or automated polls), or a mix of both (IVR then agent).
Statistics
The analysis and presentation of reports will be handled by industry standard tool JasperReports, for stunning results. Reports can be seen on-screen, and saved in many popular file formats, as PDF, XML, RTF, and others.
Project status and timeline
Due to time constraints, pre-release of AACC has been delayed. We are back to developing the application. No date is being set for first release yet, but we'll keep you posted. Make sure you join our user's mailing list to stay updated!
What are we working on, right now...
Feb. 6, 2009 update. We're prioritizing finishing the daemon. Working on historical and realtime statistics. Planning dialing methods. We have made a few improvements in agent toolbar.
Sep. 4 2008 update. Great progress have been made in all areas of the system! Especially the daemon and agent toolbar. We have done some progress also in the administration tool, especially in historical and realtime reporting.
Source code
Source code is available via svn at SourceForge.net. Please be advised that, being at pre-alpha stage, the trunk source code is non tested, so: it's definitely not apt for lab testing (let alone production), many features are not yet implemented, and those which are may not work as expected. This of course will change in time!
Components
Campaigns
There are two types of campaigns that AACC can handle.
- Agent campaigns: are those campaigns that will be handled to an agent. The call flow may or may not include previous IVR interaction. If predictive dialing is enabled for the campaign, zero-second customer wait will be attempted. A predictive algorithm will use agent availability to adjust dialing pace.
- IVR campaigns: are campaigns which are not meant to be delivered to an agent. This type of campaigns are generally best suited for outbound-only. Available IVR channels and occupancy are used for call rate adjustments by the predictive dialer algorithm.
AACC makes no distinction between inbound or outbound campaigns. Any campaign can be either inbound, outbound, or blended, to the administrator's discretion. For a campaign to dial outbound calls, it will just need to have an active contact list and a destination extension (usually a queue, or an IVR).