Providing A Hosted Solution

The latest version of SmoothTorque provides a GPL web based front end which allows you to sell SmoothTorque predictive dialing to other call centers. Customers can simply log in to the web system, upload their messages and phone number lists, and run a predictive dialing campaign.

The website is provided with full source code allowing modification to suit your needs. Simple settings such as the logo and colour can be easily changed without making any changes to source code.

Screen shots of SmoothTorque in action

SmoothTorque Algorithms

The algorithms in SmoothTorque are the best in the industry, meaning that you have more staff working, more of the time. By using SmoothTorque your call center operations will be streamlined.

For example, using manual dialing with a 20% chance of success and an average call length of 70 seconds, your staff would be on the phone 44% of the time. If you shifted these staff to using SmoothTorque, you could expect between 70% and 80% of your staff on the phone.

For a call center with 20 staff working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, this equates to 248 hours per week of extra time talking to customers.

Outbound Calling

SmoothTorque uses the most advanced predictive algorithms in the industry to make sure that you have as many staff active on the phone at any given time.

SmoothTorque is able to tell the difference between an answer machine, an IVR and a human, and route only the calls which have live customers to you staff. This means that instead of having your staff talking to machines, they are always talking to customers.

With other predictive dialers, you may have noticed that far too many calls are made.

The result of this is that people will receive phone calls with nobody at the other end. The algorithms in SmoothTorque prevent this from happening. In the past this used to be seen as simply a waste of money and a nuisance. This is now illegal, so using SmoothTorque reduces the risk of litigation.

Message Broadcasting

SmoothTorque can be used in a couple of different scenarios for message broadcasting; Press 1 Transfers and Simple Broadcasting.

Simple broadcasting allows you to dial a list of numbers, and play a message once the call is connected. Because SmoothTorque is able to tell the difference between answer machines and live calls, you can specify different messages for each audience.

Press 1 transfers are the same as message broadcasting with the option for the customer to press a key while the message is being played to transfer to a call center.

Some Key SmoothTorque Features:

• Number List Scrubbing

• External File Importation

• Random Number Generation

• Sequential Number Generation

• Reporting

• CRM Integration Capabilities

• Predictive Dialing

• Dynamic Self Adjustments

• Talks directly to Asterisk™

• Integration with any PBX

• Load Balancing Across Multiple Servers

• Redundant Failover Servers

• Web based number loader template

• ASP Serving Solution

• Run multiple simultaneous campaigns

* Please note that using less than 5 agents in predictive mode is not optimal. Calls per second mode is preferred in these circumstances.

Predictive Mode Dialing
The program uses a system of buffers combines with fuzzy logic to predict how many call center staff are idle and generate enough calls to keep them busy without generating more than the required. I.E. if you set the staff number to 100 it will try to make as many calls as possible while staying at less than 100.

The program adjusts itself in realtime to allow for increases/decreases in rates, call length etc.

It also has means to protect against the usual oscillations that occur in a predictive system.

In a nutshell, it looks at how the past data has bought us to our current state and then alters the current speed so that if it was using that speed in the past, it would have reached a perfect percentage.

Number Scrubbing
SmoothTorque can be used in conjunction with Asterisk 1.6, 1.4 or 1.2 to make short calls to a list of numbers in order to check if they are valid numbers or not. This can either be done with ISDN PRI/BRI, Analog Lines or with VoIP Calls.

This is the simplest usage of SmoothTorque and can even be performed with the LE version (although with a slightly less optimal approach than in predictive mode).

External File Importation
In SmoothTorque you can import external lists of numbers to dial in either a flat text file or an excel file.

Random Number Generation
You can specify the range on each digit of a phone number, for example the first digit has to be 1, the next has to be between 2 and 7 etc and then tell SmoothTorque how many numbers you would like it to generate in this range. It will then generate a list of random numbers within this range with no repeats.

Sequential Number Generation
You can specify the range on each digit of a phone number, for example the first digit has to be 1, the next has to be between 2 and 7 etc and then SmoothTorque can create every single number within these ranges.

Reporting
SmoothTorque can be used with AGI Scripts (provided) to keep a log of where every call arrived at in the process. For example you can mark calls as having gone to an agent, being an answer machine etc. SmoothTorque will then provide "Hangup Stage Reports" which can be exported as WordPad files for viewing externally.

SmoothTorque can also show you information of how many numbers in each campaign have been dialed.

Asterisk™ can be used in conjunction with Asterisk-Stats to provide a web based reporting package to show you the status of every call.

CRM Integration Capabilities
Because SmoothTorque is used with Asterisk™, it means that it can be easily integrated with a web based (internet or intranet) CRM package by using the GPL package Flash Operator Panel. Together with Asterisk™ and the Flash Operator Panel, SmoothTorque can bring up a record from your crm just as if the staff member was receiving an incoming call. We can provide examples of how this works, or can simply set it up for you.

Dynamic Self Adjustments
In SmoothTorque, the predictive dialing capability has been made 100% autonomous since the release of version 3.0.

There are 3 speed adjustment factors with around 30 input variables. Depending on the percentage success rates of a campaign, SmoothTorque will alter the running speed so that there are as many calls as possible without making too many calls.

In the latest versions, we have added a dynamic boost feature which will kick in if certain trigger conditions are met. Each of the runs will have less impact on the running speed, but it will adjust the running speed so that it moves as a direct relationship to the percentage of staff on the phone.

There is also a maximum running speed. If the running speed goes over this value, then it will find it increasingly difficult to move up when it wants to and easier to move down when idle or trying to decrease speed. However, if the running speed is constantly trying to raise itself higher (i.e. the maximum running speed is too low), then the maximum running speed will be increased by an amount depending on the area above the maximum running speed but below the running speed.

The best way to understand this is to watch the system in operation. With the demo available above, you can perform a simple load simulation, where you can specify the average length of call and the percentage chance of success for each call. If you change these values in the middle of a campaign, you will notice that SmoothTorque responds rapidly to the situation and will alter its settings.

Technical Details: How it works

A SmoothTorque system is fully controlled from your web browser meaning that you can use the system from any device which has a web browser such as Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD, cell phones, set top boxes etc.

SmoothTorque can be broken down into two main parts.

1. The controller machine: SmoothTorque™, Apache™, PHP™, JPGraph™ and MySQL™.

SmoothTorque is written in ANSI C and controls all of the dialing process. Apache is a free web server which is included with most operating systems. The web server uses PHP to display all of the web pages and JPGraph to do all of the graphing.

MySQL is used as the back end database and this both stores the data for the program and acts as the trigger to start and stop campaigns.

2. The Asterisk™ voice nodes

SmoothTorque tells Asterisk to make calls, play messages, check for humans and answer machines and then receives reporting information back from Asterisk based on what it finds.

When you want to be able to do a larger quantity of calling, you simply add extra Asterisk voice nodes.

Both the controller machine and the Asterisk voice nodes can run on Linux, FreeBSD or OSX.