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Softdial Contact Center Architecture ...
Softdial Contact Center™ is a series of contact center services built around a command and control hub known as Softdial CallGem™. CallGem takes responsibility for call session management, routing, ACD logic and pacing, and provides clean and consistent interfaces for the various line-of-business applications required to make up a complete contact center solution. CallGem also embodies Softdial Plugin®, Sytel’s proven and world-leading predictive pacing engine.
The key drivers for developing the product in this way were:
- The need to manage large contact center installations and distributed contact centers from a central point.
- The need to provide architecture that can deal with individual resource and component failure without bringing the contact center to a halt.
- The requirement for real-time reconfiguration of the system and commissioning of new resources without outage.
- Ease of integration with third-party applications, CTI and management tools.
Taking advantage of the CallGem Architecture
CallGem is a mature yet continuously-evolving product. Our first customer installation using CallGem was delivered in 1997 and is still going strong today. Since then, using CallGem as a base, Sytel has built best-of-breed components to address the line-of-business requirements of the contact center. The interface schematic below shows our current product line:
The components above comprise an entire contact center suite and have been developed using CallGem’s standard interfaces. If contact centers have made significant investment in a third-party CRM or scripting solutions, then such applications can be integrated cleanly with the CallGem API and take advantage of Sytel’s telephony and multimedia services.
Scaling Softdial Contact Center
The architecture of Softdial Contact Center lends itself to large-scale distributed operations. For large-scale enterprises with multiple sites and hosting operations there are Softdial Contact Center topologies that will deliver up to 10,000 SIP or TDM channels per landlord instance. Traditional contact center wisdom suggests around 2,000 channels as an upper limit for landlord instance size for media-rich contact centers.
But just as Softdial Contact Center has been designed to scale significantly, it does provide a very cost-effective solution for all contact centers having as few as 10-20 seats.
Hosting Considerations
Support for the needs of hosting operations is at the center of the design of Softdial Contact Center. All services communicate using a standard TCP/IP based protocol making it possible to deploy Softdial Contact center in a wide range of topologies to suit the needs of any kind of contact center hosting model.
Softdial Contact Center is especially well architected for high availability environments. The key requirement for high availability in practice is support for dynamic reconfiguration and adding new resources to the system without outage.
Security of communication is critical to hosting operation; all of Sytel’s server-side applications can be configured for protocol encryption to ensure security of data and also for challenge authentication in order to prevent outage from denial-of-service attacks.
On the client side, all applications are deployed via the web to mitigate the need for client installation, and to make system upgrades painless.
For some applications such as agent desktop scripting this runs native in a browser. This allows the greatest flexibility in deployment for contact center agents.
Applications that have lots of real-time feedback or complex functionality such as state viewers and console applications for supervisors are deployed as native .NET applications that are hosted in a browser.