Should I use Asterisk?

Im thinking of getting a business idea of mine off the ground and need some way to take orders over the phone cheaply.

I decided IVR may be a good way to go since I probably wouldnt have to worry to much about busy signals compared to hiring a call center, because if this worked out well I may get hundreds of calls at one time, and as far as im concerned a busy signal = lost customer.

Problem is, as always with business adventures, you cant garauntee your success. I’ve got in contact with some IVR companies, and their sales pitches were great untill they told me that if I wanted their service with credit card verification, the setup fee was $6,000+, and then I would have to tack on a minimum of $500 worth of minutes a month.

So im desperately looking for alternatives, and being the open source fan that I am I remembered about asterisk.

From what I read it can take orders, but is it able to send the info off to some kind of third party for verification and fraud protection? how would this be done? And is the way customer information is stored in the database customizable? I would like to be able to generate lists that the usps label printer likes to make my life easy (formatting thousands of names would be a pain).

I dont even know if I should discuss hardware/bandwidth requirements yet lol.

Any advice appreciated, even if someone knows a good ivr company that isnt insane on cost feel free to PM me about it, but I need to keep my possible investment risk to a minimum.

[quote=“generalchaos”]I decided IVR may be a good way to go since I probably wouldnt have to worry to much about busy signals compared to hiring a call center, because if this worked out well I may get hundreds of calls at one time, and as far as im concerned a busy signal = lost customer.
[/quote]

Not sure about this part, because a reasonable music on hold (up to 5 minutes) would be acceptable if customers really want the product. (When was the last time you heard busy signal when calling a call center?) And if your business is wildly successful, a good (and flexible) call center should be able to add agents on demand.

Just curious, how does an IVR take people’s name and address? IVR payment processors are usually for established accounts. How do you plan to establish these accounts? Mail order? Then a Web based payment processor would be much more efficient (and cheaper).

Credit card verification is a relatively minor challenge. Just call some processors your local stores use and find out.

Heres the thing- Asterisk can easily handle a ton of calls, feed them an IVR, take credit card numbers, and then pass them off to an external credit card system by one of several methods.
What Asterisk does NOT have is good voice recognition, and that is tricky for any system. I can guarantee that when someone orders something to be shipped to 14 Ondrejka Lane, Hephzibah, GA or something like that Asterisk is going to screw it up. The only way to deal with such an order is to record sound files for each field and then have a human type them in later.

Now once the customer is in the system, its pretty easy to set up * so they punch in their account number, a security code, product number, quantity, credit card #, etc as they are not entering any text. But until then, you are much better off with a live operator.

thanks for the replies, it looks like I should look into call centers instead for the time being then.