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

Dynamic Agent mode is very useful in a outbound call center, agents login to a queue and hear some music we definied in the queue, then predictive dailer start works, it dials customer numbers and once it get connected the dialer will redirect the call to the queue, and agent in the queue could hear a beep immediately then could start talking to the customer, it’s so quick that customer just think it’s a call from the agent. With asterCRM, agent could get customer information once the call get connected, here we’ll introduce how to set dynamic agent in freepbx and asterisk: First, we need to add some extensions and queues in FreePBX: add extensions: go to FreePBX extensions page, then we add a queue and choose a dynamic agent for it like following figure yes, if you want to add a dynamic agent for a queue, you should add a agent number with A in queue agent list, and we can notice that message from FreePBX. so we need to counfigure agent.conf in asterisk conf directory, here we add a dynamic agent which number is 1000, its passoword is 0000, name is Brad then we add a dialplan for agent login in extensions_custom.conf like following line: update the context of extension 8000 to “agent-test”. here, we had a queue which include a dynamic agnet, well then we need add a user in astercrm, go to the extension management page of astercrmand add a new extension and assign agent 1000 to him: Agnet start work: first the extension have to login as a agent to PBX, when 8000 dial “*789″, it would hear the prompt that require to enter the agent number and password to login as the agent, enter agent number 1000 and password 0000, it can login as agent 1000. login to asaterCRM by brad/1234, the asterCRM could pop-up if anyone call to Agent/1000 or extension 8000.

Predictive dialers, systems that automatically place outbound calls and deliver answered calls to agents; they are the key to using your sales force time as efficiently as possible in your outbound call center.

Here we use asterisk and astercrm to build a predictive dialer.

1. we need to install asterisk, for beginner you could use trixbox.
2. install astercrm, it could be on same server with asterisk or on a different one. the newest version is 0.046,  installation guide could be found here.
3. there’s a bug in 0.046, if you have not used a previous version, you need fix the bug, execute these two line in your mysql:

        alter table diallist add creby VARCHAR(20);
        alter table diallist add cretime datetime NOT NULL default ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00′;

4. login as admin/admin, go to “Manager” -> “preference”, we need to set which context to use when make outbound call

the outcontext could be

[from-sipuser]
exten => _X.,1,Dial(SIP/TRUNK1/${EXTEN})

when a outbound campaign start, predictive dialer would first drop the phone number to this context, so this context should be your outbound context.

5. then we go  “Manager” -> “Extension” -> “Group Manage”, click “Add” button to add a new group.

here we need to notice thw parameters: pdcontext and pdextensions, this mean how to handle the call when it’s answered. Here, the context in extensions.conf could be something like

[from-trunk-customer]
exten => queue1, 1, Answer()
exten => queue1, n, Queue(tech-queue) 

when the call is connected, it could be redirect to queue “tech-queue” and answered by agent in this queue.

6. add a account as groupadmin, go “Extension” and click “Add”, add a account, group is AstercrmGroup3, usertype is groupadmin

7. next, we should prepare a diallist, we could use “Import” function to import diallist from a excel or cvs file. The operation could be done using the groupadmin account we just added. Logout and then login as the groupadmin, go to “Import”, select the local file, and then click “Upload”

“import” function could help us import phone numbers to diallist, we check the two check box on the buttom, the 0 in the select box, means the 0 column. click “Import” to continue, when finished, it will tell you “diallist : XXX records insert success”, then we could to “Diallist” and check if it imported:

8. now every thing is ready, we could go “Dialer” to start, coz only a admin could start a predictive dialer, so we logout and login as admin again

we could click “Dial” button to start, the number in input box is the maximum channels number, dialer would stop once the concurrent channels reach this number, it could be modified as you like.