I own a dental clinic in Brazil. I have some telephone contact needs: (1) receive inbound calls from my patients, mainly for scheduling; (2) place outbound calls to my patients, mainly to remind them of upcoming appointments or to reschedule missing appointments. The clinic operates with a system which generates a Firebird Database and I built a CRM layer (“front-end”) using Microsoft Access. Today, I have 2 “agents” who daily receive Excel spreadsheets with information about patients they should call. They use regular telephone lines (no PABX). They dial manually. They don’t register the outcome of their calls – they simply schedule the patients they succeed in contacting.

I believe it’s time to get some more productivity. Therefore, I would like to:
+ use a dialer (power would be enough, no predictive)
+ have some pop-up functionality that would show who is the patient on the phone (doesn’t need to be integrated in the system or in the Access “front-end”)
+ have an ACD to handle incoming calls

It’s a very small business, so cost is a major concern. Do you have any tool or suite who would fit my basic needs at a reasonable price? Would it be simple and easy to implement and keep?

Based on your requirements, Voicent can provide all the functions you require. The software package we recommend:

Outbound appointment reminder with confirmation:
BroadcastByPhone Professional 1- line
Optional: Text to Speech Plug-in

Inbound call:
IVR Studio professional 1-line
Voicent CRM one user

Analog phone line requires:

1x Cisco SPA3102 voice (gateway) modem -> buy at your country to reduce the international shipping cost.

After you install the software and get it working, it is very easy to use.