[Asterisk-Users] * For Call Center

[mattf]

Hello,

I think you need to do a little more looking around on the Asterisk
resources and on Google. What you are trying to do is mostly possible if you
have the time, patience and money to follow through with it. 

One thing you need to learn is that a great many on this list despise
telemarketers of any kind, and even more so they hate it when people don't
do their own research for questions that have been answered many times
before.

Asterisk cannot easily be turned into a predictive dialer(which is a good
thing) there are a few people that have created simple auto-dialer programs
that simply dial one number after another one-at-a-time(Myself included)
which is not very efficient for bulk cold-calling, but works wonderfully to
call back your customers on a quarterly basis for customer checkups like my
company does with it's customers.

There is a group of Asterisk users that decided to modify the code of
Asterisk to try to make it a predictive dialer, called shady_dial I believe,
but I haven't heard anything about it lately.

Back to your questions: 
- yes, Asterisk can be used for a fractional voice/data T1. there are
several people that have done this.
- you will need a decent powered x86 computer with at least a digium single
T1 card 
- yes Asterisk can be used as an auto-dialer, if you program it to do so
yourself. The easiest way is to use the manager interface or generate .call
files, but it is not very fast and will not piss people off at a high rate
like a the predictive dialer you want will
- maybe Asterisk can be turned into a predictive dialer, but you'd have to
do that yourself or find out if shady_dial has succeeded in their project
- yes you can use a screen popup system on win32 or Unix there are resources
out there to do it and it's not terribly hard to do if you understand the
APIs involved.
- no, Asterisk will not work out of the box for what you want to do, it will
take effort and time to get it all working and you may end up spending as
much as you would on a predictive dialer to get it all done.
- don't expect much sympathy from the people here on this list as the the
cost of a predictive dialer.

Thank you and good luck,

MATT---

-----Original Message-----
From: empire underground [mailto:empireunderground at hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 11:08 PM
To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] * For Call Center


Hi Everyone ;)


   I have posted something like this before but yeilded no solid help as of 
yet.
I am new to * and havent even setup a box for it yet as to I have no clue 
what I should go ahead and buy before wasting a few $k. Im looking to setup 
* for my office with outbound calling only with some call agents, and also 
remote agents so they can work from home. At this time im not looking to do 
Voip at all... but that will change in the future. I have a T1 with 12 
anolog lines and the rest for data (768k). I need to know what cards I 
should buy? I would also like to setup the box with 12-16 lines for outbound

calling, and im nto trying to do (IVR). What I would like to do is make * 
either a predictive/auto dialer only. I read about a few people doing this 
when searching google but cant find the links anymore :( Aslo someone made a

win32 program to log into * and get screen pops of all the info that was 
dialed for that # such as address, name, phone, ect... I dont realy care if 
I have to write an agi for it in linux because I hate winblows and would 
rather stay far far away from it ;) If anyone can help or point me in the 
right direction it would be much help ;)
Also I have checked wiki allready... I cant really find anything there for 
this. Also is it even possible for this? I know I would have to write a agi 
for the screen pops to popup in web browser and rout that info to the person

logged in and waiting in that queue, I was thinking about using sql backend 
for the db and maybe writing agi to import the .csv file? Also I was 
thinking about flying someone down here to Florida if all else fails (unless

you already live here) to maybe help setup this type of box, or even giving 
root access to the box and configuring it? because a commercial  dialer 
costs WAY too much! they want anywhere from $3500-30,000 for dialers... and 
then even pay another $1,500 for a license per agent that wil be using it! 
talk about getting raped!
thanx for all you help in advance
chris

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