ACS-Communicator: a low-cost customer service oriented communication service framework for e-commerce businesses

Customer service in e-commerce businesses is one of the most essential aspects for business continuity, and a good communication service framework not only has a great influence in customer service staff's work efficiency, but can also reduce the operational cost of e-commerce enterprises. This paper proposes a communication service framework, called ACS-Communicator, to facilitate the communications in customer service. ACS-Communicator is a set of Internet distributed cluster architecture. It combines communication systems and customer service workbenches together, providing an integrated production solution for customer service. Based on the LVS technology, we separate the framework into media flow and signaling management, so that the system networking becomes more simple in capacity expansion. Our proposed framework is a software defined architecture, hence reducing the overall cost for businesses. We evaluate ACS-Communicator in a large call center within Alibaba Group, which is one of the largest call centers in the world. The experimental results show that ACS-Communicator can cover 99.99% communication service groups within Alibaba, can support over 500 enterprise users to provide communication services, can achieve a total call time of over 400, 000 hours per day, and can achieve a high overload of 450 calls per second, when using the same computational machine resources as the existing framework (FreeSWITCH).