I’m looking for some practical advice about a technical solution for a contact centre I am designing. I don’t know much about Asterisk, other then in broad terms that it is supposed to be very flexible. Flexible is good… but it also makes me nervous.
I’m on the business end, and I’m getting some advice from the telephony guys, but they don’t have any experience with asterisk. They’ve suggested a solution with Avaya, but it doesnt really do what I need it to do, and its very expensive.
The contact centre is expected to be fairly light volume, maybe 500 – 1000 calls a month. Needs to be high availability, and very stable though.
Can asterisk do this? Am I going to have to wander so far down the customisation path that I should not bother?
Any thoughts/experience are most welcome. Just exploring it as an avenue at this stage, I will engage a professional service provider for more specific advice if it looks viable.
I don’t see how you will ever be able to obtain the caller’s IMEI.
I believe Asterisk can do SMS, but I’m not sure of the details. You should investigate IP access to SMS centres for this. Exactly what is available for SMS is likely to be country specific.
It’s a mobile (cell) phone exclusive in bound centre. It’s not a big deal whether we use IMEI or CallerID, main thing is identifying the caller quickly.
I’ve done some reading about Asterisk, but what I really wanted to know, was if I was trying to ‘fit a square peg in a round hole’. Like I said, the feedback I had regarding a proposed Avaya solution suggested that it could be done, but was not a very good natural fit.
I’ve no experience with telephony, but I have worked on large systems before and I do not want to end up on a long and painful customisation adventure. Been there, done that . Configuration is fine however.
The primary CRM solution is controlled by a 3rd party, so I considered scraping the data to a secondary db better, because we’ll have more control/access of it. Still don’t know much about the 3rd party system, so it is still very early days in this project.
I’m in Australia. I took a look at your site, I think you’re probably too far away/crazy different timezone for my purposes, but I appreciate your feedback.
Yes we are in the UK but have customers in the US , South Africa and did provide a solution to SMS service in Australia.
What you are trying to do is possible and very similar to what we provided to a UK airport carparking company which again had a 3rd party system that had to be scraped to get the data to route the call.
We do work very odd hours and it could save you a lot of time.
Looks like it can be done pretty simply using an AGI script. Collect CallerID from the inbound service, use the AGI script to dip into the database(s), and then continue the dialplan based on the results of the AGI.
That’s why the answers have concentrated on IMEI (which is probably not available to you) and SMS.
In my view AGI is over used. It may make the database integration easier, but everything else can be done directly in the dialplan and probably even the database access.
True, AGI does seem to be the duct-tape of Asterisk. It does work better with native dialplan Applications, it’s just a matter of whether or not the dialplan applications can talk directly to the databases involved.
The key was that its a 3rd party DB that will need to be scraped , this can be all done from the dialplan with no use of AGI.
as said, we have deployed a system doing exactly this no AGI and 20000+ calls a month and customer data scraped from a closed 3rd party db system, Customers names are read back to them using Swift TTS to give a personal experience.
AGI’s are over used and severely reduce capacity of servers.
. Configuration is fine however.