Bruce Kaskey co-founder of OrecX company and contact center guru, speaks about the present and future of Asterisk industry

Bruce Kaskey has over 28 years of experience in technology product management, sales and marketing. Prior to co-founding OrecX Bruce worked at Stevens Communications and Eastman Kodak.

Could you summarize for our readers your profile and your role in the Asterisk community?
OrecX has been a dedicated Digium-Asterisk Software Partner for over 10 years. OrecX offers high end call center grade call recording, screen capture and Quality Management tools for Asterisk based PBX systems.

Oreka Asterisk Call Recording is typically useful in high density Asterisk application where it’s best to offload recording to a separate system and make 100% sure that recording cannot impact the performance or reliability of core switching capabilities.

Mr. Kaskey, what’s your view on the future of the Asterisk call-center industry in the next two years?
As controlling contact center costs and full, open interoperability continue to be rising concerns in the customer service industry, we see the Asterisk (and open source) call center industry continuing to proliferate across organizations of all sizes and industry sectors. See our recent Asterisk blog post titled "The Rise of the Open Source Contact Center" in June 2016 in which we highlight the many advantages of using open source technology in the contact center - including cost savings, easy customization, nimbleness, openness, fast bug and security updates and more.

What kind of benefits do you think professionals experience with call-center monitoring suites like QueueMetrics?
There is a big need for all-in-one comprehensive solutions like QueueMetrics in the contact center today, ones that take the place of multiple disparate solutions. QueueMetrics provides a complete view of the contact center across all dimensions. This is very advantageous to contact center and business-unit managers who want to measure activities on agent performance, sales targets, conversion rates, operational performance, etc.

What are the key factors which make a successful Asterisk based call-centre?
Openness, security, interoperability, scalability, customization, ease of use.

What are your thoughts about the strategic role of call-center analytics?
Contact centers today are only as good as the targeted goals they achieve, meaning they can no longer operate as autonomous entities as they now regularly serve the greater good of the whole organization. As such, the contact center management itself as well as a host of companywide business users stand to benefit greatly from the value and intelligence the contact center can provide. Therefore, solutions like QueueMetrics are necessary to turn all the raw data collected into valuable business information on performance, operational efficiency, sales conversion, marketing intelligence and more.