Pre-recorded Agent responses

[shallenbeck]

I have been asked by someone if we could implement pre-recorded agent responses, so an agent does not need to speak to people who were reached in a campaign, but instead have the agent press a button to select a suitable pre-recorded response to anything a person might say, and transfer to a 'closer' if the agent cannot adequately handle something someone says.

I have heard of this being done with touch screens, but simply cannot find any examples of software that does this anywhere. I have also scoured this forum for this type of information but have been unable to locate anything about it with my search words.

Any information on how this could be done, where I would start, or if it has been done and how, would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

[williamconley]

all things are possible. it's not a feature of vicidial, of course, but could be implemented with enough. $$

do you have vicidial installed?

[mflorell]

It may seem like a good idea, but believe me it's not. We had a client spend weeks developing this and having agents record prompts and the customers figured it out pretty quickly and were put off by it, sales fell and it was quickly abandoned.

[williamconley]

i can't imagine trying to do that without making it obvious. trying to "fool" the public is similar to saying "we're here to steal your children". but if there are "stock" statements they are expecting you to make on certain type of inbound campaigns (legalese? disclosures?) it could be useful.

[shallenbeck]

It would seem this could be accomplished using the dynamic feature in the feature.conf. However I am unfamiliar with using this and not sure where to set the channel variable to allow these features to be enabled for any agent receiving a call.

Still researching, and learning, but if anyone has experience with this in Vicidial and would like to offer some assistance it would be appreciated.

I appreciate the input I have received and although this idea may not be the best way to handle some things as mentioned above, I am working for the person who requested this, so as long as I am getting paid, I will pursue creating this functionality. It is up to them to decide how well it works for what they are doing.

[williamconley]

this is not really a "vicidial" concept. more of an asterisk/php concept (or perhaps even pure asterisk, but that may be tricky).

the goal is to play a recording in a meetme room/conference based on some form of input on the user screen. that's not actually difficult for an asterisk professional. then comes the "what to play" and "how to initiate" (with authentication). that's a php/mysql bit which would probably be best done within vicidial, perhaps in an iframe within the script for ease of creation (no editing of the vicidial.php agent page itself).

alternately, it could be initiated with hotkeys, but that's debatable.

I'm sure if you paid The Vicidial Group, they could do it quickest ... even though they are expensive, it would probably be fairly easy to accomplish simply because they know their way around vicidial's code and ARE asterisk professionals (nice combo LOL)