VICIdial: Spearheading the Open Source Contact Center Revolution

Matt Florell, President
A few years ago, a large multi-billion-dollar financial services company stumbled upon a severe bottleneck when they received an end-of-life notification from their existing proprietary call center provider. After having spent millions of dollars on their current system, the company was wary about selecting the replacement contact center set-up. The firm’s management team scouted for a call center system that displayed better dependability and one that could be operational for a long course of time. It was at this juncture that VICIdial had opened its doors to open source contact center systems, which was a trendsetter in the pay-per-solution and -service market. “VICIdial is a complete open source contact center solution that offers inbound and outbound call handling, with predictive auto-dialing features, bidirectional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) capabilities, and inbound email and customer website chat functionality,” evinces Matt Florell, President, VICIdial.

Founded as a subproject by Florell in 2003, VICIdial has built a stature for itself in the contact center industry by providing a range of hardware, software, infrastructure, support, and service for its indigenously developed contact center platform, VICIdial. The VICIdial framework is purpose-built to counter several challenges, of which Florell identifies security and regulatory compliance to be the most vital, so as to avoid unnecessary Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) litigation. With an assortment of over 2,000 features underpinned by multi-lingual support, VICIdial is helping organizations meet their contact center requirements while keeping a watchful eye over cost and security.

The company offers server hardware that can be used in conjunction with the pre-loaded VICIdial software for enterprise call center environments. Addressing flexibility, Florell mentions that VICIdial can be tailored to meet a client’s specific needs, while the expert team guides clients with the implementation. In response to organizations seeking integration features for their innumerous siloed systems, VICIdial has developed interfaces that connect the contact center with internal CRM and ERP software.


We also offer the flexibility to go from an on-premise VICIdial system to a hosted installation, and back again if needed


Post deployment, the company’s support services revolve around optimizing VICIdial to derive maximum performance and also rectify issues that may arise at later stages.

To help VICIdial adopters in the area of hosting, Florell introduced VICIhost service in 2007, where dedicated physical servers are assigned to clients, ensuring sustainability while handling high call volumes. “We also offer the flexibility to go from an on-premise VICIdial system to a hosted installation, and back again if needed,” he affirms. Once, one of their clients—a VICIhost user—that routinely places more than one million calls per day across hundreds of agents, was dealing with an agent workstation crisis. With an in-built server-based debugging option that logged every action and event performed by an agent, VICIdial was able to find and fix the agent workstation problems quickly, saving the client countless hours of troubleshooting and productivity.

Having worked with similar scenarios at many leading banking institutions, 911 call centers, and hospitals, VICIdial has facilitated over 14,000 new installations in nearly 100 countries in the last 18 months. With plans to further expand its global reach, the company is in the developmental stage of a new WebRTC phone that runs entirely on secure, encrypted web connections, and is accessible across PCs, tablets, and smartphones. “We are looking at promising times, where VICIdial will be simplifying the job of contact center agents by adding more functionalities and features,” assures Florell.

Company
VICIdial

Headquarters
St. Petersburg, FL

Management
Matt Florell, President

Description
Provider of an open source contact center suite with CRM integration, data encryption, inbound and outbound calls, email, and customer website chat

VICIdial