make asterisk your call center

The latest asterCRM has a great improvement in dialer, and with asterCRM, it’s quite easy to build a call center. Here’s a how-to for a outbound call center with Freepbx and astercrm. Following by this how-to, you can creat such a solution:

asterCRM dialer will call the numbers in your diallist, and when the call is connected, it would be redirect to a queue, where your agent will answer the call and talk the customers,  they can do survey , sales or whatever you want.

* freepbx is a web gui for asterisk which is widely used in asterisk applications, like trixbox, elastix, pbx in flash …

• install freepbx

For freepbx installation, you can read the installation document from freepbx website http://www.freepbx.org. If you are using trixbox, elastix or pbx in flash, then u can skip this, it have freepbx build in already.

• install asterCRM, make sure asterCRM daemons (astercc and astercctools) are running

for asterCRM installation, go and check asterCRM wiki:

http://wiki.astercrm.org/index.php/AsterCRM_Installation#Using_the_install_script

• add extensions for your agents and set a queue to receive calls from asterCRM dialer

login into freepbx, start add extensions for your agent

then add a queue

• set group/user in asterCRM

next login asterCRM as admin, create group “outbound sales” and add extensions for agents you created above, go wiki for more detail

http://wiki.astercrm.org/index.php/Create_Group

http://wiki.astercrm.org/index.php/Create_Extension

make sure “Extension” matched “Outbound CID”  or “Extension”(if outbound cid is blank) in freepbx

so now all your agents should get a username/password for asterCRM.

• set a campaign

put the queue number “02″ in and check the “bind” checkbox, then as soon as customer answer the call, it would be putted into the queue, and your agent could start talk!

http://wiki.astercrm.org/index.php/Create_Campaign

• import diallist

say you have already get 1000 numbers you want agents make call to, then use import function to import these number to diallist for this campaign

http://astercc.org/tips/2008/11/import-data-in-astercc.html

• agents login

your agent should get ready to start! Log into astercrm and log into the queue if they are dynamic agent.

• start dialer

both groupadmin and admin could start the dialer, go management interface and then click “Dialer” icon

check the checkbox “start”, it will start dial, u can set limit by channel or limit by agent in the queue, in the latest version, it would not stop dial even u close the page, but will stop if u uncheck the checkbox “start”.

http://wiki.astercrm.org/index.php/Predictive_dialer

• agents login

when a customer is connected and redirect to the agent in queue, it would popup customer information if you have in database

In asterCRM, it provides a survey features, so you can set survey for your customers, here will give you a simple introducation for this:

first you need to add a survey, login as admin/group admin go manager interface and click survey icon, click “Add” button for a new survey, you can add several options for one survey, and each survey it provides three kinds: radio, checkbox and text

Click the “item” link next to the option to enter items for this option

keep putting options and items until u finish this survey.

Then you can  put a survey from the agent page

*when there’s a customer or contact in your record form, if u click the “Add” link of a survey, the result will be linked with the customer

Click the “Detail” link of a survey, u can get a statistic of this survey