Web API to call a client

Posted on March 27, 2012

I would like to find out if your autodialers can receive instruction through a web API to call a client number from my database and ask the user to press a number pad button to receive a confirmation. If so, how scalable is this product using VOIP? Thank you in advance

Yes, you can definitely do that with Voicent Gateway’s web API to trigger a call, which only requires a simple HTTP post. The second part is the call message, you have two choices: one uses the low level VoiceXML interface of the gateway, the other uses Voicent IVR Studio, a GUI tool for developing IVR applications. For more information, please see Voicent Developer Center.

We recommend you use Voicent IVR to create your app since it will save you a lot of development time. The tool has a built-in support for database, so it will be easy to update your database after a call. For press a number feature, you can simply built that by point-n-click some buttons in the GUI environment.

VOIP scalability

One advantage of using VOIP is its scalability. The main reason is that it does not require a telephony board, which has fixed number of ports and connections. These boards are notorious to setup and maintain. For VOIP, the only limitation is how powerful your computer is and how much bandwidth you have. These days, a simple Intel i7 based desktop computer, which cost a few hundred dollars, can support 100 simultaneous calls. A multi-processor Xeon based server computer can supports hundreds of simultaneous calls. In addition, if you use a cluster of servers for Voicent software, you can virtually build a call center without limit on scalability.

The best way to get started is download the software and give it a try.

Posted in Outbound IVR, VOIP |

Record full audio for IVR app

Posted on March 26, 2012

I have just set up a demo version of your IVR. Is there a mechanism available to record the full audio of the call, including what the caller would say other than to respond to a question that is part of the phone tree?

From our experience, recording the full audio of a call is usually not necessary. There are better ways to know what is going on with an IVR system.

There are many drawbacks of using audio recording for analysis purpose. You need to spend a lot of time listen to these recordings and they are hard to collect statistical data through automation. These recording files also take up a lot of disk storage, especially for a busy site with many simultaneous incoming calls.

The preferred way is to log customer selection for each of the choices or stages you are interested in. This logging information, in addition to caller ID and call time, can be saved to a simple log file or to a relational database. These data can then be used for further analysis through programs like Excel or custom programs and scripts.

Voicent IVR Studio has built-in support for these features, so it should be easy to set it up.

Record Phone Conversation

Logging cannot help to know what the conversation is. This you need to use recording. To turn on recording for all calls that are transferred to agents, open Voicent Gateway, select Setup > Options > Call Transfer Tab, then select “Record every transferred call automatically“. In addition, if you do not want to set global recording for transferred calls, there is a “Recording” button on an agent’t popup screen.

What if you want to listen

Voicent offers a product called “Call Center Manager”, which can be used to monitor or listen to a particular phone line or agent. The call monitoring happens in real time.

Posted in IVR Usage |

Password verification by phone

Posted on March 7, 2012

I was wondering if I could do the following thing using your Studio Application:

1. Get a number from the caller
2. Send the number parameter to as web request.
3. Get an answer from the web with the correct password.
4. Ask the caller for his numeric password
5. Verify the password give with the password that the web server sent.
6. If correct, ask for another number then send it to the server.
7. If incorrect, give another chance and hang up.

Is that possible using your Studio Application with SIP lines?

Yes, it should be relatively easy to implement with Voicent IVR Studio.

Use the digits element to collect a number from the caller; use another digits element to collect the password. Then use the built-in web action to sent HTTP POST request (with the id and password entered) to your website. Use the web return to check whether it is correct or not. Create two child element to handle the correct and incorrect answers.

We have instructional video in the IVR studio tutorial also.

Posted in IVR Developer, IVR Usage |