I’m working on a capstone project for a systems analysis course. We’re trying to improve the business process of a military service desk, and one of their major issues is the call queue. There are two call centers which are geographically distant, and each has their own call queue. When there are no available reps at the main center, the system sends them off to the other system, which may have a line of 30 people (the queues cannot talk to each other so there is no load balancing).
I’m looking for a distributed, load balanced VoIP call queue system that can balance calls between these two locations. It would be a huge bonus if it could integrate with Remedy Service Desk as well – screen pops and that sort of thing, and possibly the customer being able to enter an open ticket number to skip the queue, useful stuff like that.
I’m not familiar with VoIP technology, and I don’t know enough terminology to really ask for what I need… I’m hoping someone here can point me in the right direction. Is this the sort of thing Asterisk is good at/can be used for? I think ACD might be the relevant term here. My preconceived idea of how this would work is that each call center would have an Asterisk server, the servers would communicate over the internet, and one of the servers would load balance call distribution between the two. Is that more or less right? Is the software I need just “Asterisk” or is there like a sub-package? Will it integrate with Remedy Service Desk that you know of or do I need to look into third party software? How do incoming calls wind up going through the asterisk server – does Asterisk handle that (with telephony hardware in the server) or does it basically only deal with IP calls that have come from an existing PBX?
I’m not sure what else to ask. Again I’m really not initiated to this technology, if there are important steps to this that I’m obviously missing please fill me in. Sorry for the many questions!