I worked with Chain Solutions for 27 months and was able to help the company expand its potential by implementing sooo many services. Chain Solutions offers solutions for call centers however their biggest client is InFocus – a fortune 500 company in the US, which is in turn a property of one of China’s biggest manufacturing plants. This is surely the most complex project I was ever a part of and this is the longest list of features you can find on my website 🙂
Some of the more notable functionalities I deployed, most of them by myself:
- self-generating documentation and a public RESTful API with more than 50 endpoints, dynamic IP whitelist and API key authentication.
- A Control Panel with interfaces to all our public API methods and connected to all other private APIs – monitoring devices, support system, etc.
- Full flexibility for DID (phone number) routing – you can have a phone number or Extension lead to anything in our system, and on multiple levels – IVR, Voice Mail, other DID or Extension, Time Profile (for example during holidays or off working hours to play a pre-recorded message automatically, or to have a different routing based on time change), Queue, SIP Address, External Number. All of this can be achieved trough the Control Panel and is enabled with simple clicks. We also had an interface to program an N-level IVR which alone took me almost a month to do!
- Billing and Invoicing – all present in our Control Panel. We also had Billing Subscriptions for various services based on Custom Packages, which are in turn based on System Packages.
- Automate everything – we had more than 20 cron jobs (only for the API part, the whole system maybe had 20 per server) running making sure nothing is left for humans to do manually.
- Payment integration – Authorize.NET with 3 gateways for 3 currencies, PayPal, Web Money (accepting all kinds of cryptocurrencies).
- Buying DIDs from 4 different providers, merged into single API methods for our client’s convenience.
- Full integration with Voxbone APIs – buying of DIDs, sending service requests, automatic provisioning.
- Integration with name.com APIs for buying and managing domains – yes, we also offered hosting and domain management for our customers! We also had an scrip to automatically deploy the latest version of WordPress to our domains.
- Created custom API to integrate with our support system of choice – osTicket. This way our support staff did not have to leave our Control Panel and had full support functionality inside.
- IP Shield, Server Status Page (listing over 100 servers in our network), Event Log – listing all events that support and other personnel should consider or be notified on, Dial Lists
- Two level Reseller scheme – they automatically get money at the end of the month based on their network’s spending. Resellers were also allowed to control their client’s accounts for convenience, but only if the client allowed them to.
- Monitor management devices in real time trough the Control Panel – integration with Nagios and its various features.
- Click 2 Call functionality – you add a code snippet you your page and customers can enter their own number, so you call them automatically! This increases conversion rates by 2-3 times of simply leaving your own phone number.
- Call Recordings – you can listen to them right in the Control Panel. You can also upload your own pre-recorded messages for Time Profiles and IVRs
- AJAX everything – most of the API requests are made on the same page – only the row you changed reloads, making the interface very fast and reducing API queries
- Flexible caching system – special error handling situations and lightning speed responses
All the functionality I wrote is still working flawlessly (at least from what I know and can see in logs), which makes me proud and I think I did a good job overall.
The company used to have an office in Sofia but the founders decided to start living in a cleaner and more relaxed environment so we closed down our office and switched to working completely remote. This was not something new to me as I have been working remotely for almost all of my professional career. The company founders were and still are very interested in building sustainable houses out of environmentally friendly materials which I also became a fan of.