You think you need a genius. Getting an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system right can be tough. It’s important to your contact center that it work from the get-go. There are so many parts, though, that it can be difficult for you to keep all the pieces in mind when you’re putting it together.
The normal method of writing an Asterisk dialplan is tedious and error prone. Logging in to your server, bringing up an editor, writing the file, hoping it doesn’t have errors, reloading, testing, etc.. What if you don’t want to log in to your server’s command line? What if your sysadmin installed vi as the default editor *shudder* ? Keeping track of where your audio files can be a pain, encoding them for proper playback can be a pain. In short, it’s a big pain. I know I don’t like writing IVRs that way.
This is why Indosoft introduced the Visual Dialplan Builder. Most call center personnel don’t want to become sysadmins. Maybe the woman writing your dialplans today has those skills, but what if the guy you hire tomorrow doesn’t? Building an IVR should be as simple as planning one out. Using our interface, you can select files you’ve uploaded through the admin screens, tie into your agent queues, pull external (and internal) data into the current call, and branch accordingly. If things are getting a little too complicated, you can break your dialplan up into multiple “pages”, and branch to different pages at logical points. You see the dialplan like a flowchart, which makes it easy to see how the call will flow from one item to the next.
Usually data capture and storage ends when the call does. If you hadn’t saved the last thing the caller entered, you could be missing that information. The Indosoft Visual Dialplan Builder has a hangup page for each dialplan, where additional post-call processing can occur. Obviously there’s a slightly limited set of functionality there. You can’t jump away to another dialplan or play an audio file. You can’t read input. But you can store your variables into the database, you can still call a webservice, and so on.
Once your IVR is ready, you can save it, then publish it to the server(s). If you test and realize you made a mistake, it’s easy to reopen it, add or change a step, resave and republish. Now you’ll be able to spend your time running your call center, rather than looking up Asterisk dialplan syntax and wrestling with non-obvious text editors.