Switching to VoIP

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Chapter 5: Enterprise Telephony Applications

greet the caller, record the caller’s name, and then ring an internal phone to ask the

local party whether she wishes to speak with the person on the recording. If the local

party indicates “no,” the call is disconnected, but if she indicates “yes,” the call is

allowed to proceed as normal with both parties connected. This application is

offered by most local telephone companies.

Asterisk has a built-in privacy management application that uses IVR

to capture the caller’s identity when he hasn’t provided a caller ID.

This application,

PrivacyManager( ), is called from the Asterisk dial-

plan configuration in /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf.

Call Centers

Call centers are the telecom equivalent of data centers: a concentration of applica-

tion resources dedicated to a concentration of users. In English, a whole bunch of

phones and telephony processes running in a relatively confined space. Call centers

can be vast gardens of telephony apps, complex dial-plans, and high-capacity call-

switching equipment.

Insurance claims processing departments are call centers, filled with armies of tele-

phone operators, CTI applications, and friendly IVR bots that take information from

customers and facilitate an appropriate response over the phone. When you ...