Automatic Call Delivery

Automatic Call Delivery ACD is a feature used to route calls in a call center enviroment to the appropriate agents, based on factors such as time available, skill sets, and priority levels.

• ACD systems place calls into a queue, where they are typically handled in the order recieved.

• ACD systems may handle routing of inbound or outbound calls, or in some cases a combination of the two.

Asterisk provides a flexible call queuing system suitable for call center applications. The Asterisk ACD system utilizes several components, which work together to provide a very robust implementation.

Queues
Call queues are used to route calls in a first-in-first-out manner to the appropriate extensions. These extensions can be agents logged into the system or any other type of channel supported by the system. Various strategies can be used to determine how calls are routed from a queue, these strategies are used to implement fair distribution of workload within a call center, and can be customized through the use of priority levels to fit an organization's policies.

Queues are configured using the queues.conf configuration file.

Agents
Agents are type of "virtual" channel specifically designed for use with ACD. While agent channels can be utilized directly from extensions.conf , they are most useful as members of an ACD queue. Agents are defined in the agents.conf file.