I hacuve some questions about asterisk's add on capcbilities

Hi all,

I am currently in the planning stages of making an outgoing call center and I have installed and become familiar with the features of AsteriskNOW but there are some features that we are looking for in a call center that I did now see and need to know about before we decide if Asterisk is right for us.

First, me and my business partner talked about the features of our ideal system and they are as follows:

  1. We need Predictive Dialing. We need a computer to dial a list of numbers that we feed into it and when we get a live person on the line, the phone system needs to send that person to one of our representatives. If we have say 15 reps, we need the smart dialer to stop dialing until one of the representatives is finished with a call. It then needs to start dialing again.

  2. Can asterisk identify if it has encountered an answering machine and if so can the phone be hung up and the dialer continue to dial from our dialing list?

  3. What do we need in order to get the dialer to get a live person on the phone and send the call to a representative and display the name of the resident on the computer screen in front of the representative if we don’t have that information on hand? A kind of reverse caller id system - does this exist?

4.Do we need an internal multiple-rj-11 computer card in order to attach multiple phones to an asterisk system? We saw a video online that described an ability to attach BT-200 phone through a hub or we could also use www.ekiga.org. How do we interface the BT-200 phones into the Asterisk server? How do we interface the computer running ekiga to the Asterisk server? What kind of hardware / internet connection speed do we need to support a 25 person call center with either one of these phone solutions?

5.Is there an official No-Call List that interfaces with an autodialer and reports a do not call request with that list? What do we need to know about cold calling and the law? Is there a website that we can check for updates to this type of thing sa as not to ever get a fine?

  1. Are there more than 1 No-Call Lists? Like one on the Federal level and another on a State level?

  2. We would like an interface that allows a call representative to flag a caller as a do not call again. Either built into the autodialer or Asterisk.

  3. A feature we would like to be able to use is customer notes and a no call timer that can be customized to any date we choose. We want to be able to ask a customer if they would like to buy something and if they say that they bought one of the item that we are trying to sell, we want to be able to feel out when the customer will be in the market for our product in the future and have them be put on the call list again automatically.

Thank you for any help in advance.