Asterisk is an IVR System | Call Center System | Voicemail System

Asterisk is an IVR System

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) revolutionizes just about every business it touches. The power and flexibility of a programmable phone system gives us the ability to respond to our customers in meaningful ways.

We can use Asterisk to provide 24-hour service while reducing the workload for our employees at the same time. Asterisk allows us to play back files, read text, and even retrieve information from a database. This is the type of technology you come across in telephone banking or bill payment systems. When you call your bank, you hear a variety of recordings and issue commands usually using a touch-tone telephone. For example, you may hear greetings and status messages, along with the messages asking you to type in your account number and other personal information or authentication credentials. You will also often hear personalized information such as your last few transactions or your account balance, which will be retrieved from a database. Systems such as this can be and have been implemented using Asterisk.

Asterisk is a Call Center System

Through the use of queues, call detail records, and its open source nature, Asterisk has become a popular choice among call centers. Queues allow call centers to handle calls in a controlled fashion by placing callers in a holding pattern until an agent is free to take the call. Music on hold can be customized to play messages that further help advertise a company's products or services while the caller is waiting. Other features such as approximate wait time, position in line, and ability to play an IVR with options (such as allowing a caller to leave a voicemail) are some of the enhanced features a call center will need.

Call detail records can also aid call centers as they contain data that can be sorted and put together by queue statistic applications. Some of these open source statistic applications can identify strengths and weaknesses in a call center's routing strategies. For example, the call detail records can record when a caller has hung up and left the queue before an agent has answered the call. This data can be useful as it can identify average wait time and how often callers become impatient and hang up.

Asterisk, being open source has also opened doors for other open source call center applications to be developed for it. For example, today you will find many CRM and predictive dialing applications working with Asterisk.

Asterisk is a Voicemail System

Asterisk has a fully-functional voicemail system included. The voicemail system is surprisingly powerful. It supports voicemail contexts so that multiple organizations can be hosted from the same server. It supports different time zones so that users can track when their phone calls come in. It even provides the option to notify the recipient of new messages through email. In fact, we can even attach the message audio.