Online form triggers automated phone call

I am looking to do this:

When a user visits my website, there is a form to fill out asking for name, phone number and email address. When they click Submit, I want to a program that will call them automatically (within 5-10 minutes say) and deliver a recorded greeting.

Someone in your Sales Department said this can be done using the command line interface and a script to extract the phone number field from the email that the online form generates and sends. What I need are the details of the scripting that is involved to do this. Please advise-any assistance is greatly appreciated, and will play a large part in determining which version of your product I will consider purchasing.

First, there should be not too hard to trigger an automated phone call from an online form. Voicent programs are all web aware – actually the main interface of Voicent products is the web interface (HTTP).

Normally, when you create an online form, you will have a form handler program/script to handle the form submission. Depends on your web server, you may use a script language like Perl or PHP for your form handler. All you need to do is insert the command to invoke Voicent program in the form handler. For more details of the program integration, please see the developer section of Voicent’s web site.

The second part is to determine where to run Voicent Programs. If you have a dedicated web hosting service or run your web server internally, you should be able to install Voicent programs on the server computer or on a different computer on the same LAN. This should be easy to setup.

If you are using a shared web hosting service, you may not be allowed to install programs on the server. In this case, there will be more setup involved, but the idea is the same as when you using the dedicated web hosting service. You have to install the Voicent program on a computer somewhere else but is accessible from your web server, i.e., your web server should be able to send HTTP request to the Voicent Program.

If that is not possible to setup, you could try to trigger the automated call from an email program. In your web form handler, instead of calling Voicent program directly, you send an email to an dedicated email account. Then on the computer you install Voicent program, use a program like that of emailtophone to trigger an automated call. By the way, emailtophone is open source.

The third part is to decide what message will be played for the automated phone call. Do you want to collect feedback, transfer call to an agent, etc. Easy interaction can be implemented with Voicent BroadcastByPhone, for more control, use Voicent IVR Studio in addition to BroadcastByPhone.

All this may look a little confusing at beginning, so the best thing is to download the software and give it a try. We’ll be help you more if we know more details of your project.

OK, when someone fills out the web form (user), they enter their name and phone number. User clicks “Submit”, form is processed through PHP form mail processor (example), which emails the form field contents to me. I need something that will also isolate the user phone number from this form and trigger an automated recorded call to the user’s phone number (Hi, this is _____. Thank you for supporting XYZ Industries…) If I add the right scripting information to the PHP form handler, it can do this automatically as a separate subroutine, as long as this information can reach the computer where Voicent is installed, correct? Please clarify and put my mind at ease that we are on the same page.

Yes, your understanding is correct. Actually if you use Voicent Gateway’s simple call interface in PHP, you can do so in just one line:

call_text($phoneno, ‘Hi, this is __. Thank you for …’, 1);

where $phoneno is the phone number field in your form.