Active Call Center Professional Features

Our baseline Active Call Center product is an ideal solution for small to medium size call centers handling up to several hundred calls per day.

For larger call center applications, we offer Active Call Center Professional. Active Call Center Professional is a server grade application designed specifically for an enterprise class deployment.

Active Call Center Professional offers the following features:

• Massive call processing power capable of managing thousands of calls per day per line. In our labs, we tested 24 line configurations with in excess of 70,000 calls per day with no problems.
• CPU and memory usage optimized for heavy load environments. The performance difference when compared to the base Active Call Center product is astounding.
• Active Call Center telephony engine optimized specifically for use with high-density telephony configurations.
• Self-healing code designed to maximize uptime. If individual Active Call Center components fail during a call, Active Call Center will end the call and attempt to heal the failed components prior to starting the next call.
• Direct upgrade from Active Call Center, no code changes required!
• Active Call Center engine capable of running on digital T1 lines supported by Brooktrout or other TAPI compliant T1 hardware.
• Support for up to 48 lines in an analog or digital T1 environment (exact limits depend on the complexity of the application).
• Support for Lucent's Text-to-Speech Engine - this carrier grade speech engine is the ideal text-to-speech tool to use with high density Active Call Center configurations. The Lucent text-to-speech engine eliminates the performance liability created by running the free Microsoft text-to-speech engine under a heavy load environment.

In all of our tests, the Microsoft text-to-speech engine fails under heavy loads, including failing consistently with Active Call Center Professional. Any Active Call Center Professional applications requiring text-to-speech use should be deployed with the Lucent text-to-speech engine.

• Backed by our 40 day satisfaction guarantee.

Active Call Center Professional has the following limitations:

• Applications requiring speech recognition should not be deployed with Active Call Center Professional. The speech recognition implementation in Active Call Center will fail under heavy loads. We are currently in the process of finding a speech partner to provide an industrial strength speech recognition solution for use with Active Call Center Professional

Suggestions for Using Active Call Center Professional

Active Call Center Professional performance can be maximized by following a few simple guidelines:

• Use internally generated Call ID numbers. Internally generated ID numbers are guaranteed to be unique on a single inbound Active Call Center session, persist across Active Call Center sessions, and are extremely high performance. This option is available under Tools ... Voice Telephony Settings.
• Do not use the default Call History database format. The default Call History database format is a Microsoft Access 200 database. This database will start to fail under heavy load once the size of the database has increased. Refer to the section on the Customizing the Call History Database Format for information on implementing a custom database format.
• Use wave files instead of text-to-speech whenever possible. If text-to-speech must be used, use the Lucent or other industrial quality text-to-speech engine. Text-to-speech operations are CPU intensive. For maximum performance, text-to-speech use should be limited. For applications that require text-to-speech, use only an industrial quality text-to-speech engine designed for use in a multi-channel telephony environment: for example, the Lucent text-to-speech engine. While the Microsoft text-to-speech engine should not be used in a high-stress multi-channel application, our tests indicate the Lucent text-to-speech engine is as reliable as wave file playback with Active Call Center.
• Use a wave file for the error message instead of text-to-speech. Wave files use much less CPU time than text-to-speech and the simplistic nature of the code makes it unlikely to create any sort of problem when a call ends due to an error of some sort. The error message can be set under Tools ... Voice Telephony Settings.
• Use only high quality COM components that are known to support multiple simultaneous instances in VBScript Macros. Usually scalable components that are designed to be used with web and internet servers will satisfy the quality requirements for use in a multi-channel telephony environment. Stick to those components or write your own quality components.
• Do not use speech recognition features. Current implementations of speech recognition in Active Call Center are not designed for high stress use.