IDEA Cellular, India's leading GSM Mobile Service operator was the first cellular company to launch music messaging with 'Cellular Jockey', 'Background Tones', 'Group Talk', a voice portal with 'Say IDEA' and a complete suite of Mobile Email Services. IDEA wanted to widespread their dialer tone (Ring Back tone) service which would not only help in adding value for it’s customer’s money in a unique way but would also help them in achieving the rewards being providing an error free and reliable service.

For this they wanted a highly capable partner that would ramp-up the operations within a short period of time, that has an experienced management team and has zeal to grow rapidly being demonstrated through their rapid and very elaborate responses. Other key characteristics they sought in a partner included:

Cogent had other things as well that need to be taken care of i.e. to have a standard number for all outbound calls, to have an excellent voice recorder system which could make the task of maintaining and searching any voice log at any point of time much easier and which can be handled both manually and automatically. For all this they first needed a PBX that could serve their purpose easily at the same time being highly economical, rightly fitting their budget. This led them to go for Asterisk which is an open source PBX which runs on linux. But the voice log file’s naming convention they were using was not supported by linux so another solution was needed to eliminate this problem. Also the standard problems that have been faced due to the usage of normal analog phones in this case, need to be handled in a way so that no question of incompatibility arises and so that the entire system becomes completely digital.

Ultimately, the solution they came out with was a well connected network that was being set up with Airtel and Reliance on copper for voice and data. The Cisco 36xx router with 6 E1 capability provided support for setting up 180 calls simultaneously. The Asterisk, apart from providing common PBX functionality such as conferencing, music on hold etc. helped in building a complete full proof application with CTI functionality in an inexpensive way. Further, being an open source PBX, it greatly reduced the overall cost. Not only this, by using Asterisk, the problem of Linux being not supporting voice log file’s naming convention was completely solved by transferring the recording in windows and saving the recording there in proper format as wave files and then these files were made available for performing the critical operations such as searching, editing etc. Currently, Asterisk is also supporting the Recording System’s functionality. It can record 1 to 32 audio channels simultaneously with automated start and stop controls being built in. It also features digital signal processing to improve voice intelligibility and automatic level control. Further, the recordings are automatically compressed for archiving which can be later on searched by date, time, line or other data using the software directly or even using the web browser. Then, this recording is made available for web or internet access by uploading the recordings to a FTP server. The usage of X-Lite phone helped in eliminating the problems being faced by using the analog phones. The X-Lite phones are softphones that allowed them to make call through their computers.

The benefits to IDEA were immediate. The company's sales for ring back tone service increased tremendously in a period of two months. Providing with a complete digital solution, its immediate effect can be directly seen on the per day sale being atleast Rs.700 with both customer and agent being happy in the long run. Further, the solution proved to be really cost effective with overall cost coming out to be around 25 lakhs. The use of Asterisk as voice recorder proved to be highly beneficial by making the task of accessing the recordings much easier and also allowed to set up any number of channels as per the requirements. Side by side, 100 percent voice logging was achieved. Barging and public IP facility can be utilized with a great ease which helped in continuous monitoring of agent’s code of conduct during the calling operation and also eliminated the possibility of any private calls being made through the agents. The attendance of the agents is maintained through a well developed software where in complete attendance report of any agent is generated within seconds. A Call Data Record (CDR) is also maintained which gives access to information such as the call duration of any call being made, status of the calls as to being connected or not etc. Another software is used for the purpose of call follow-up which serves as a reminder in case any customer was not available earlier and needs to be called again.