Can asterisk be used to take orders?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
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I’m working with a very small business that recives 60% of their orders over the phone which takes up lots of manhours. We were thinking after hearing about Asterisk, that maybe we could get one with some scripts to do things like, interacting with customers through a phone tree and let them order a product, provide credit card number and info. Record name, and hopefully somehow spell it out(don’t know how that would work), leave questions about products. Setup appointments. Pull up information about returning customers, etc. Can Asterisk do these types of tasks, or would we be better off using some other open source product. The number one problem is money. If we can use a computer we have laying arround and only have to spend money on manhours, which at this point may even be volunteer on my part to learn and get this thing running, that would be the first priority.

  • Thanks
2

wow, deja-vu :smiley:

yes, but you’re going to need to do a lot of work. this is a post from a few hours ago http://forums.digium.com/viewtopic.php?t=3123

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The difference with what I need is it doesn’t need to be voice usable. I think we can do with a simple phone tree using dtmf tones. Plus, all the system needs to do is gather the info and possibly email / forward it to the worker. Or just stick it in a file/database.

Are there any other type of products that would do this better/easier?

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no voice ??

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[quote=“frozendice”]The difference with what I need is it doesn’t need to be voice usable. I think we can do with a simple phone tree using dtmf tones. Plus, all the system needs to do is gather the info and possibly email / forward it to the worker. Or just stick it in a file/database.

Are there any other type of products that would do this better/easier?[/quote]

If you are looking to do this with menu trees and DTMF then Asterisk is a fairly straightforward platform to do this with. I am not familiar with a better opensource choice.

There are several examples of how to do IVR with Asterisk located here:

voip-info.org/wiki/view/Aste … s+ivr+menu

I also recommend you pick up the O’Reilly book linked in my signature below.