Integrate RightNow with open source Asterisk Contact Center Solution

Oracle RightNow (RN) helps deliver great customer experiences across the primary engagement points of web, social, and contact center by integrating internal business processes with external channels customers mainly use to interact with organizations.

Even after the emergence of new service channels such as social, web self-service etc, traditional Telephony or Contact Center service channel is still very popular among the Customers & Service Industry.

RN provides out of box solutions for web and social service channels in the form of Customer portal, Facebook app and Social cloud monitoring tools.

RN doesn’t provide out of box connectors to any contact center solutions. Instead it provides a development framework (referred as Multi channel toolkit in RN terms) for building these connectors.

Using this development framework we have developed a connector to integrate RN & Asterisk Contact center solution.

Asterisk is a low or no cost; world’s most widely adopted communication platform. The below screen shows some stats about Asterisk and click this link for more details on Asterisk, http://www.asterisk.org/

 

 

 

Integration Architecture:

 

Approach:

• RN specifies a Multi-Channel Toolkit framework to enable Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) to RN Applications.
• Asterisk provides Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI) to facilitate Integration with external applications.
• Asterisk’s TAPI is consumed in RN’s Multi-Channel Toolkit framework to develop Integration Bridge (connector) between RN CTI Toolbar and Asterisk Telephony Server to facilitate a seamless integration.
• Since integration bridge (Connector) is developed by customizing Multi-Channel Toolkit, we don’t need a separate hosting server to host this customization. The customized framework/toolkit can be deployed directly in RightNow server.
• This solution can be a right fit for customers who have a Contact Center channel and are looking for a low cost solution working with RN.

Note: The Integration approach suggested in this article is suitable for any other contact center solution (Avaya, Cisco etc.) integration with Oracle RN.