Phone System for Helpline

WexCan

Hi, jus another post about this helpline (which is quickly becoming the bane of my life lol)

Say if we had three volunteers on at a time - we'd need a system to queue calls and send them to the next available volunteer with one of those nifty little messages "Thanks for calling Niteline, your call is important to us, please stay on the line and we'll get to you as soon as possible".

What type of system would we need for this? How many phone lines?

We don't have much money to play around with either, so affordable ideas appreciated

Thanks a lot

Chris

oscarBravo

Asterisk is almost certainly a good fit for this. It can do pretty much anything that can be done by a PBX. The number of phone lines depends on how many calls you expect to get - in other words, how many calls you want to be able to have on hold before a caller hears a busy tone.

WexCan

So how would that work? What equipment would we need? Not sure of call volumes yet.

Basically, we're opening as a helpline service for second level students - first in the Munster area as a trial and then nationwide.

We're going to get a 1890 number, but anything further than that and I get lost.

So say we have 1/2 phone lines, 3 volunteers, a computer. What hardwar would we need to buy? Say if we used Asterix, how would it all connect etc etc

Basically we want callers to get this:

Not Busy: Transfer straight to a volunteer.
Busy: Hold message for x amount of time before suggesting they call back later.

Hope i'm not being too much of a pain

Chris

oscarBravo

WexCan wrote:

So how would that work? What equipment would we need? Not sure of call volumes yet.

You'd want a half-decent PC - Dell have very affordable servers these days. To connect to phone lines you need FXO cards. Check out the Digium products, something like the Wildcard TDM400P would probably be the business. You could put two FXO modules in it, and two FXS to connect phones to, for under $400.

WexCan wrote:

Basically, we're opening as a helpline service for second level students - first in the Munster area as a trial and then nationwide.

We're going to get a 1890 number, but anything further than that and I get lost.

I'm not all that up to speed on the upstream side of it, but basically you need your 1890 number to forward to a hunting group (might not be called that) of numbers, connected to your asterisk server.

WexCan wrote:

So say we have 1/2 phone lines, 3 volunteers, a computer. What hardwar would we need to buy? Say if we used Asterix, how would it all connect etc etc

1-2 phone lines and three volunteers guarantees 1-2 idle volunteers. The idea is you need more phone lines than volunteers. Say instead you have four phone lines and three phones. The phone lines connect to four FXO ports on the server. The phones connect to FXS ports. All you need then is someone to hack the Asterisk config for you.

WexCan wrote:

Basically we want callers to get this:

Not Busy: Transfer straight to a volunteer.
Busy: Hold message for x amount of time before suggesting they call back later.

Hope i'm not being too much of a pain

Not at all. That sounds like something Asterisk could do without breaking a sweat.

steve-hosting36

Asterisk is the way to go, we're actually rebuilding our entire support / phone systems around it and the flexibility is amazing!