SmoothTorque™ Predictive Dialler and Message Broadcaster

VentureVoIP has developed what we (and our customers) believe to be the most advanced predictive dialler in the industry. No more waiting for a sale or wasting time listening to answer machines and busy numbers.

  1. SmoothTorque™ predicts the future better
  2. SmoothTorque™ is easier to use
  3. SmoothTorque™ scales to any size

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If you're looking for a predictive dialler (something to keep your call centre staff busy), then you'll really see the benefits of SmoothTorque™ over other solutions in the way that it predicts the future.

If you're using SmoothTorque™ for Message Broadcasting, Polling or Emergency Warnings, then the benefit from SmoothTorque™ you'll see over other solutions is in it's ability to scale to unlimited channels and calls per second - a single SmoothTorque™ controller has been tested at 500 calls per second with the ability to use multiple controllers in larger settings.


Increase your productivity

In a traditional outbound call centre, your staff spend a lot of the time effectively doing nothing useful, either listening to answer machines or dialling busy numbers. This is the way of the past.

Now you can connect directly to prospective clients with every call that an agent takes. SmoothTorque™ will take care of scheduling the calls, keeping your agents busy and getting rid of pesky answer machines and busy/disconnected numbers.

Testimony:

My name is Jose G. Perez, CEO of Telephonica USA Corp. I met Matt in 2006 and I have been using SmoothTorque™ since the first version.

It is the best investment that I have made, ever.

SmoothTorque™ is the most powerful and sophisticated predictive dialer. There is no other in the market like SmoothTorque™.

VentureVoIP has spectacular customer service and great direct support. It is open 100% to customer-driven improvements. I tested Vicidial, Osidial, Elastix Call Center, and other Open Source dialers but none were like SmoothTorque™: powerful, super fast and stable.

I recommend VentureVoIP and SmoothTorque™ 100%.

Keep your outbound call centre busy

Imagine this scenario: you have a call centre of staff who need to call clients. One by one they go through the numbers, listening to answer machines, dialing busy and disconnected numbers etc.

Now imagine a new scenario: instead of the above, the agents come into work, the call centre manager presses start on a campaign, and SmoothTorque™ takes care of all of the dialing. Agents never need to press another button on their phone, they never speak to answer machines, disconnected numbers or busy numbers. Instead of spending most of their time trying to get in contact with clients, they spend most of their time working with clients.

Another scenario: you have 500 people that you need to call to tell them that they have a library book overdue. You could go through the same thing of dialing them all one by one, or you could do it all automatically, play the client a recorded message (including after the beep on an answering machine), and you can move your call centre staff to another job. Simple, efficient, cost effective.

Provide a hosted solution

Because of the way that SmoothTorque™ is designed (with a Linux back end and a web based front end) you can provide a hosted solution to your customers or to other call centres.

As long as you charge your customers more than you are paying for your termination, it's quite easy to ramp up your system and make an ever growing profit.

If you are not looking to provide a hosted solution, but would like to get in contact with someone who is, you can mail us and we'll get you in contact with someone in your local area who is running a message broadcasting/predictive dialer solution.

Advanced Algorithms

First off, SmoothTorque™ uses incredibly advanced algorithms to predict what is going to happen in the future. Other systems just look at past data (if at all) and use this to say what will happen in the future.

SmoothTorque™ uses a large collection of algorithms (some based on fuzzy logic concepts and some entirely new) which mean that SmoothTorque™ is able to adapt to changing situations very rapidly.

Let's take an example - say you're calling people and it's the day of a major sporting event. No predictive engine is going to know that this is going to happen. So what happens is that the response rate to your campaigns suddenly drops off. SmoothTorque™ can quickly react to this and change it's dialling patterns immediately. Great, so your staff stay busy.

So, what happens at half time or at the end of the game? All of a sudden your response rate improves significantly - again SmoothTorque™ will recognize the change and update immediately.

Anti-Oscillation and Boost

SmoothTorque™ is also able to counter effects of rapid movements by preventing oscillation. In any system that reacts quickly to changes there is the potential for this. SmoothTorque™ however avoids it by introducing a concept of elasticity - this creates a situation where it is able to react to a potentially oscillatory situation by smoothing out the response.

Another area where SmoothTorque™'s algorithms really come into their own is when increases in speed aren't proving to be beneficial - SmoothTorque™ includes a built in "boost" system which will allow campaigns to have their rate temporarily increased in order to both maintain a good level of busy staff, and recover from a rapid disconnection of calls.

One other cool thing that SmoothTorque™ does is manage multiple campaigns using the same trunk when you have a situation where you really need more calls per second or channels than are provided. SmoothTorque™ distributes the available resources amongst campaigns in such a way that everyone will be able to continue to run, but with less capacity than they normally would have.


Trying it out


While we prefer to get things set up for you so that we can be sure that SmoothTorque™ meets your needs and is installed correctly, we realise the need to get something now and try it out.

If you would like us to set up a demonstration for you, please send us a note and we'll get everything set up as soon as possible.

If you'd rather try it out for yourself, you'll need to go through the installation steps in order to get your system set up.

Screen Shots

Hardware Requirements

Minimum requirements: (2 Servers)

SmoothTorque™, Apache, MySQL: 1 server - 2.0Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 10Gb disk space
Asterisk: 1 server - 1.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 5Gb disk space

Recommended requirements for small-medium system: (3 Servers)

SmoothTorque™: 1 server - 2.0Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 2Gb disk space
Apache, Mysql: 1 server - 2.0Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 10Gb disk space
Asterisk: 1 server - 1.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 5Gb disk space

Recommended requirements for medium-large system: (4+ Servers)

SmoothTorque™: 1 server - 2.0Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 2Gb disk space
Apache: 1 server - 2.0Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 10Gb disk space
MySQL: 1 server - 2.0Ghz dual core, 2Gb RAM, 30Gb disk space in a RAID 1 configuration
Asterisk: multiple servers - 1.5Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 5Gb disk space

Recommended requirements for enterprise system: (3 + 8)+

SmoothTorque™: multiple servers - 2.0Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 2Gb disk space
Apache: multiple servers - 2.0Ghz quad core, 2Gb RAM, 10Gb disk space
MySQL: multiple servers - 2.0Ghz eight core, 2Gb RAM, 30Gb disk space in a RAID 1 configuration
Asterisk: multiple servers usually in blocks of 8 - 2.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 5Gb disk space

Note that for a large enterprise system it is recommended that for redundancy purposes the system is split into blocks of 8-10 Asterisk servers, each with their own MySQL, SmoothTorque™ and Apache servers.




How it works

It really depends on what kind of capabilities you want out of the system, but the basic design is has four components:

  1. SmoothTorque™ Backend
  2. MySQL Database Server
  3. Apache Web Server
  4. Asterisk Machines

We recommend that Asterisk does not run on the same machine as anything else you are running for performance reasons.

In a small call centre scenario, you would have one machine running SmoothTorque™, MySQL and Apache, and another machine running Asterisk.

In a large message broadcasting scenario, you would have one machine for SmoothTorque™, another for MySQL, another for Apache, and then a collection of Asterisk Machines depending on the capacity you require.

Pushing the boundaries

Note that with SmoothTorque™ you can do a few extra things to increase capacity to extreme levels. First you can split the CDR records and the SmoothTorque™ database onto separate machines. If you're looking at hundreds of millions of numbers you may even want to split input numbers from output numbers.

SmoothTorque™ has been designed so that you can run cronjobs to calculate status images once and produce an output png file. This means that if you have many people all watching the status of a campaign you do not need to calculate the statistics for every viewer.

Extreme technical details of the inner workings of SmoothTorque™

SmoothTorque™ polls the MySQL database to check for entries in the queue table.

These entries are to pass requests from the front end to the back end. Entries can be added to start/stop a campaign, change the number of servers or change the number of agents.

Once SmoothTorque™ starts a campaign it will load in phone numbers into two arrays. Once the first array of numbers has been dialed it swaps the two arrays over and begins filling the second array. The reason for this is that we don't want to have to wait for MySQL to return us the results.

MySQL Buffering

In fact, when it comes to MySQL, we don't rely on any type of response time. Any information that needs to be saved to the database is put into a queue, and SmoothTorque™ will send items from the queue at the fastest rate possible. The reasoning for this is that if you do something which causes MySQL to slow down for a while, you don't want it to be slowing down SmoothTorque™.

Asterisk Buffering

We actually do a similar thing with the Asterisk servers. When a campaign wants to make a call, it doesn't actually send it to Asterisk, it sends it to a funnel. The funnel is responsible for distributing the calls amongst Asterisk servers at the rate you specify for the trunk. If an Asterisk server has a problem, the call is sent to another machine instead, and SmoothTorque™ will try to resurrect the connection to the lost Asterisk machine in another thread.

One of the benefits of this is that campaigns can run at whatever speed they like including temporarily above the maximum rate that an Asterisk machine can accept. If the funnel starts filling up, the campaigns which have the most calls in the funnel are slowed down.

Peace of mind

These components result in a system whereby you can even restart the machines that SmoothTorque™ is connected to without any problems in SmoothTorque™. If you need to take a machine down for maintenance, just do it.

While this may all sound pretty complicated, it all happens in the background without needing any user intervention. You don't have to worry about it because SmoothTorque™ will look after it for you.