Virtual call center with operators at home. Possible?

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

I have an IT background and Nortel Meridian 1 experience. I am new to Asterisk.

I am now opening a pizza business. We will have considerable incoming phone volume for orders and I had a thought. We would like employees to work at home answering the phones on a contract basis. I was thinking of having them VPN into our server to access the POS software. Could I also route calls over the connection with VOIP?

We would have an ADSL line (though a T1 might be better) and the users would have ADSL or cable. Any ideas on how possible this is and what would be needed to implement it?

2

Is it possible, sure.

The questions I’d be asking for implementation would be:
How many “agents” are you expecting to be answering the phone at a time?
How much bandwidth does the POS software chew up over the vpn?
Will the “agents” have softphones, or be using an ata such as the linksys spa1001 or an IAXy?
Will you have POTS lines or will the calls from your customers come in via a SIP provider?
If you have analog circuits, you will need either an analog interface card, or a voip gateway such as Audiocodes or Xorcom to connect them to asterisk.

Hope this helps.

3

[quote=“davevg”]How many “agents” are you expecting to be answering the phone at a time?
How much bandwidth does the POS software chew up over the vpn?
Will the “agents” have softphones, or be using an ata such as the linksys spa1001 or an IAXy?
Will you have POTS lines or will the calls from your customers come in via a SIP provider? [/quote]

  1. We would start with no more than 4 concurrently. As we expand, we would add agents.
  2. The agents would be remotely controlling a PC so actual bandwidth would be minimal.
  3. I have no idea. The do not need sophisticated features.
  4. POTS lines I would suspect. I have no experience with SIPS. If it is cheaper and as reliable, I would be fine with that.
4

One thing you could look at is one of the many VirtualPBX services out there. This would reduce the bandwidth required to come in to the shop for VoIP and make sure the bandwidth requiredments of the POS software etc dont interfere

There are several companies that do just this sort of thing and you could just have soft phones for the ‘agents’ and have a couple of ATAs or hard phones at the shop for calls getting answered there.