Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Technology powering Cloudagent-Cloud based Call Center Product

We at Ozonetel take great pride in powering the call centers for SMEs/SMBs and Enterprises as well. We know that the call center is generally the first point of contact for a customer with a business and we are proud of the architecture we have created to make this contact as error free as possible.

Some numbers:

Currently Cloudagent handles more than 10 million call center minutes in a single month with more than 30,000 agents logging in. We also manage 10s of terabytes of data(audio, logs etc)

The Cloudagent API is also pretty robust and handles 10s of millions of API requests every month.

Technology Stack:

We have dabbled with all the cool new kids on the block including Redis, Mongo, Nodejs etc, but for our core, we have gone with the tried and tested stack and it has held us in good stead.

1. Mysql: The complete backend is handled in Mysql. Our star DBA, Anupam, has created a set of scripts and procedures which somehow magically handle whatever we throw at it.
2. Java and PHP: For the application layer we went Java and PHP. Though they may not be as sexy as the new programming languages, they have got the job done and we have so far found no reason to try out new things.
3. Beanstalk: For all queuing purposes we use Beanstalk. Once again, we had to add a lot of monitoring stuff on top of this, but its fairly solid.
4. Mongo: We push all our logging to Mongo and manage that centrally.
5. Redis: This is a new addition to the family, we are experimenting with a new analytical engine using Redis. The results are encouraging and we will be rolling out new dashboards next month.

Really sorry, this blog post is not about some flashy new tool which has helped us out :)

But the truth is, the old, tried and tested tools with proper fundamentals and good design patterns have helped us to reach this scale. We will talk about our design patterns in another blog post.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Taking a rural BPO operation live in a day - Just another day in the life of a cloud telephony company

August 14th:
Just another normal day of office. We are all working on our respective jobs( or playing TT :)). At 10:14 am we get a lead on our portal at http://www.cloudagent.in. This was from one of the biggest rural BPO organization in the country. Immediately sales team reaches out to the lead and gets the details.
The Requirement -
  1. Calls from every circle in India, have to be greeted and treated in their local language or atleast identified and tagged for that circle. 
  2. Also, calls should be routed to North, West, East and South based on circle of the caller. 
  3. All calls have to be greeted first, then loaded into the dialer so that heavy loads can be catered to.
This is for a prestigious government project and has to go live immediately after the independence day speech. Some time ago UPA government gives a nod for one of their dream project. Soon, a private BPO provider with agents from rural areas in India bags the contract and reaches out to us, Ozonetel, to help them out in setting up a cloud based call center.
Image courtesy:bpovoice.com

2:30pm:
All teams are a go for making this project a success. The telecom team reaches out to our partners in various telcos to get a fancy number. The provisioning team starts the resource provisioning process and the IVR team gets the requirement on the IVR.

5:30 pm:
Requirements are frozen and all systems are kept ready for deployment once the announcement is made.

August 15th

Independence day speech- The Prime Minister Announces about the project to the Nation to keep their promise.

9:00 am: Ozonetel starts work and deploys the contact center solution with the complete requirements in 4 hours. This includes configuring agents, setting up skills, configuring administrators, user management.

Every good thriller story has a twist and even our go live had a twist. Though we were told that the go live date would be August 17th, we were told at 12:00 pm that the advertisements about the service would come the next day itself and hence the go live would be on August 16th. No problems, the wonderful team at Ozonetel has handled much harder twists than this.

4:00 pm: The call center goes live with training to the agents for 15 minutes ( Our Agent UI is that simple to understand and use ). The agents take test calls and are happy with the simplicity of the system.

10:00 pm: Call testing is finished.

12:00 am: Ozonetel team calls it a day and the team break open a few bottles of beer.

August 16th:

The phone number is published in leading dailies and agents start getting live calls.

Now - We have a happy client, UPA breathes comfortably at the successful go live ( just kidding :) ) and our team still working on other such projects...its an every day job at Ozonetel to make live such projects....

More stories coming ....The real ones ...from the Experts in Cloud Telephony.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Top Reasons Indians Call Businesses

We at Ozonetel, handle millions of call center calls in India(more than 700 million so far). Most of the top companies in India use our products to power their communication infrastructure. To support this we have a whole host of monitoring dashboards. Today, we want you to have a peek at a cool Live calls dashboard that we have built using Arborjs and Angular that gives you an insight into what verticals Indians call. This is a live dashboard(but only of a subset of the total calls) of the verticals which are receiving calls on our platform right now. It auto updates every 10 secs.

We will be open sourcing the dashboard code on Github next week.

You can view the live dashboard in a separate screen