Implementing an inbound contact center using Asterisk can be simple or difficult, depending on the needs of the center. This post is going to focus on creating a basic inbound campaign that will incorporate a direct inward dialing (DID) number, an IVR, and a few queues.
First, you will need to acquire your DID from a provider. The provider should also supply the inbound gateway or trunk, so that phone number gets routed properly to the ACD. Once you have obtained the DID, you can then assign it to your desired inbound campaign.
We are going to need an IVR now. Using the Q-Suite’s visual dialplan builder, we can quickly and easily construct an elementary call flow. All we need is a type of menu component that plays an audio file outlining the available choices to the caller, which will redirect the caller into an appropriate queue based on their selection.
The queues that we create will be the end points of the IVR. Combined with skills-based routing, your inbound agents will receive the queued calls once they are or become available.
The complexity of your inbound contact center depends on many factors. It is very possible that an IVR could contain hundreds of components, multiple dialplan pages, and numerous queries to external sources. On the extreme end of the spectrum, sometimes all you need is a menu of options and a couple of queues to send callers to. If you have the means to keep it simple, keep it simple.