Argh! Is finding 'right' solution that difficult?

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Looking for the right solution is driving us nuts! As a small business looking for a flexible, low cost, scalable VOiP solution proved much more difficult than we realized.

We have 3 e-commerce stores and 1-2 in house service reps with several T3 lines. What is the best way to implement the phone systems? We want to start integrating a centralized customer service department for support and our current setup is proving way too expensive to justify having it to begin with.

Ideally, each toll-free phone call will:

example for Store #1 : (800) best-toy

Main Greeting; press 1 for support, press 2 for sales, press 3 for spanish.

Customer press 1, call broadcasted to any available phones or quequed > “Thank you for calling Support, you’re call is important to us, please stay on the line while a rep answers your call. You may press # at anytime to return to the main menu or simply leave a message by pressing 1.”

Customer press 2, call broadcasted to any available phones or quequed > “Thank you for calling Sales, you’re call is important to us, please stay on the line while a rep answers your call. You may press # at anytime to return to the main menu or simply leave a message by pressing 1.”

Customer press 3, call broadcasted to a specific phone number with Spanish speaking reps (possible outsource) > “Thank you for calling Sales, you’re call is important to us, please stay on the line while a rep answers your call. You may press # at anytime to return to the main menu or simply leave a message by pressing 1.” (translated into Spanish of course)

We wish to replicate this for each of our ecomm stores but have only 2 CSR’s capable of handling the volume. Can asterisk help here? What kind of solutions are we looking at? Do we also need VOiP service at all?

We run Linksys SPA-942 phones currently off a powered T3 line with VOiP service from Capanis.

Any help is appreciated. We are also looking into Trixbox but unsure if we can have these features and what the workflow will look like at this stage of research.

2

Asterisk will work for what you want to do. You can use Trixbox but you can also use plain Asterisk with FreePBX without all the other crap that Trixbox puts into there systems. The other option is to use the Asterisk GUI (either as a seperate install or use AsteriskNOW).

You still need either a VOIP provider or you need to have an analog or digital card in your Asterisk server to handle incoming calls from the PSTN. Even though you only have 2 CSR’s you need a line\channel for each incoming cal you want to handle simultaneously. A call on hold (or in a queue) counts in this number. If you expect times where you have 10 calls in the queue you need 10 lines\channels. Since you have plenty of bandwith (unless its totally consumed by your existing websites) VOIP may be a very good option for you.