[asterisk-users] Telemarketer Torture....

[Ade Vickers]

James Finstrom wrote: 

> Anyone have the telemarketer torture prompts? I would seriously like to
revive this.....


I created a simple "hold forever" loop, thus:

[tele_loop]
exten => s,1,Answer()
exten => s,2,Set(DEVSTATE(Custom:telepark)=INUSE)
exten => s,3,WaitMusicOnHold(15)
exten => s,4,Wait(1)
exten => s,5,Playback(pls-hold-while-try)
exten => s,6,Wait(0.25)
exten => s,7,Goto,3

exten => h,1,Set(DEVSTATE(Custom:telepark)=NOT_INUSE)
exten => h,n,Hangup()

; If anything goes wrong, quit the loop
exten => i,1,Set(DEVSTATE(Custom:telepark)=NOT_INUSE)
exten => i,n,Hangup()

When I get a call from a telemarketer, I either manually dump them into the
loop (via an extension defined elsewhere) , or I can drop them into it using
CLID. This plays music for 15 seconds, then asks them to wait while we try
to put you through, repeat... The 1 second gap between the music ending &
the announcement beginning is designed to make them think someone's
answered. I may need to tune it up to 2 seconds, I'm not sure yet.

The devstate Custom:telepark is used so I can monitor if someone's in the
loop using a lamp on my phone :) It's not perfect: the loop can hold an
indefinite number of calls, but the lamp goes out when the first one exits.
Mind you, having the lamp causes its own problems: I tend to find that
instead of getting on with my work (which was the plan), I end up timing how
long they wait until they give up (record: approx. 18 minutes) instead. So
maybe I need to make Asterisk put some tracking information into a database,
so I can just run a report at the end of each day :-)


Cheers,
Ade.

(PS: The pls-hold-while-try is either a standard Asterisk sound, or comes
with the Asterisk-Addons package, I forget which.)
(PPS: I use Asterisk 1.4 with the DEVSTATE patch applied)

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11:31