Vance Dailey, CIO of Intermedia Marketing Solutions, speaks about the future of Asterisk call-center industry.

Vance Dailey has been CIO of Intermedia Marketing Solutions since 1990. Prior to joining Intermedia he was manager of systems development at Foster Medical, a division of Avon Products.

Earlier experience included application programming for a Pensylvania based consulting firm. He attended Pennsylvania State University where he majored in General Science.

While at Intermedia Marketing he has transitioned Intermedia from an antiquated platform based on proprietary hardware to an industry leading call center platform architected on an integrated mix of open source, proprietary and internally developed applications. The winner of several industry awards, Intermedia's technology is recognized as among the most advanced and comprehensive in the outsourced call center industry.

Q: Could you please summarize for our readers your company profile, your target customer and reference market?
Founded in 1983, Intermedia Marketing Solutions offers outsourced call center services and technology hosting services for call centers.
Industries served include health care, banking and hospitality.
Intermedia's technology platform tightly integrates a suite of open source and proprietary solutions including an internally developed, industry leading, call center focused CRM system.

Q: What kind of benefits do you experience using and selling QueueMetrics?
QueueMetrics has, through its comprehensive reporting capabilities, allowed Intermedia to optimize productivity while meeting client performance requirements. QueueMetrics' ability to support integration with our call recording application and our CRM system has provided a centralized source for managing all aspects of the call center.
QueueMetrics' superior capabilities, including its excellent Quality Assurance System, has been a deciding factor in Intermedia winning new contracts.

Q: Could you give me an example of how you have dealt with a customers critical issue using QueueMetrics?
Compliance issues are top of mind from many of our clients. In several cases QueueMetrics' powerful selection/filtering capabilities has allowed Intermedia to find specific calls that have been the target of a reported caller complaint. Another example is the ability of QueueMetrics to identify specific quality and performance issues that campaigns at risk.

Q: What are the key factors which make a successful Asterisk based call-centre?
From a technology perspective Asterisk based call centers need to address scaling and reliability challenges with a sound server and network architecture. Information security has become an absolute requirement in today's world and Asterisk has to be configured to work in a secure environment. Regulatory compliance requires the proper configuration of Asterisk and all supporting processes and procedures.
Finally, Asterisk, by itself, does not provide the tools for managing the onslaught of information generated by even a modest sized call center so a successful Asterisk based call centers need to adopt a comprehensive real-time and historical reporting solution.

Q: Mr. Dailey, what's your view on the Asterisk call-center industry future in the next two years?
Call center complexity will continue to increase. Client and management expectations will increase.
Security and compliance requirements will continue to be more demanding. Minimum acceptable uptime metrics will continue converging toward five nines. While happening at a slower pace than predicted by some, support for chat, email, texting and to a lesser extent social media will become the norm. Over a slightly longer horizon, voice response will be the subject of renewed interest supported by advances in technology developed by the smartphone industry. Reporting will continue to evolve from metrics based reporting toward data analytics with larger enterprises turning towards big data technologies.
Asterisk will evolve to either natively support these trends or it will evolve in such a way to embrace applications that do.