21 thoughts on - Call List Campaign To An IVR

• To be more clear I need unattended campaign

• It is possible to do everything you require with Dialplan and Bash scripting.
  It is also (1) highly illegal and (2) morally beneath contempt. So, not out of any desire to avoid a charge of “conspiracy to misuse an electronic communications network” but in simple solidarity with everyone who has ever been pissed off by a machine-initiated spam marketing phone call at an inappropriate moment, I am not going to tell you how to do it.

• Hat-tip to you, AJ 🙂

  Pete

• Hi,

  This will be a simple survey to registered customers on our website. I
  believe there are different other scenario that won’t be unethical or unlawful.

  Thank you!

  Amelye Hat-tip to you, AJ 🙂

  Pete

• It might be worth noting that the VA has a system in place that sends automated phone calls to each patient scheduled for an appointment 3
  days beforehand to remind them of their upcoming appointment, and directs the patient to confirm the appointment. There might be other examples of a call list campaign to an IVR to consider?

  Tom

• Did they explicitly sign up for the sole purpose of having you call them? Even if they did I’d get mad if a robot called rather than a person, though a robot wouldn’t get through my anti-spam CAPTCHA IVR. If a random website that required me to sign up to download some file started robo-calling me I’d be quite upset.

  – -Michael E.
  —–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—

• We once developed a reminder system for a customer. He’s a cleaning company, cleaning homes and offices. He was spending two hours a day calling his customers to remind them of their appointment the next day. Two hours a day equates to 40 hours a month that he saved with that system. He’s been using it for maybe 6-7 years now and not once was a customer upset that they were called. Of course there are many ways that someone can abuse an autodialer, but this wasn’t one of them. Regards;
  John V.

  —–Original Message—

• As a side note, as your customers may have mobile phones, sending them SMS may look less intrusive.

  Extra bonus : the appointment date is written down and most smartphones should allow a calendar event creation by clicking on the properly crafted message.

• I agree, those are good ideas and we did eventually develop an SMS
  feature later on. Another thing we did to cut down on the ‘annoyance’ factor was to maximize the chance of sending the call to voicemail directly. We were able to develop a feature to send the call to voicemail about 90% of the time. That way, an end user could (1) not be bothered by having to answer the call, (2) delete the message without listening to it, or (3)
  listen to the message when it was most convenient for them. That way, they were in control and things were done on their terms. Regards;
  John V.

  —–Original Message—

• Love the idea. How?

• exten => _X.,1,Dial(SIP/0111${EXTEN}@myprovider&SIP/1${EXTEN}@myprovider,3)

• It was a very long time ago, so I’d have to dig through some old notebooks to get the exact details, but it wasn’t too difficult. Basically, two calls are made. The first call is made with the wait time set to about a quarter of a second. We modified the Asterisk source code to allow floating point values for the wait time, basically modifying only 1 or 2 lines of code. Even a non-programmer could do it. When the first call is made for such a short period, the remote end still goes off hook, but the call will end before it starts to ring. Then, halfway through the first call, a second call is made. Since the remote end is off hook from the first call, the second call will get sent to voicemail and the message is played there. I
  remember having to do some testing to get optimal wait times and delays in milliseconds, but overall, the ability to go straight to voicemail was a valuable tool for us. Regards;
  John V.

  —–Original Message—

• Amazing. Who knew?

  So how/why does this work?

  I see 2 calls going out to my cell. Does the first ‘busy out’ my number at my cell provider so the second goes straight to VM? What part does the
  ‘0111’ play?

• Yep, if you have two calls going to the same number at the same time the second will be busy.

  Meaning it will go to voicemail.

  Meaning it will be answered.

  Meaning the other leg will be dropped.

  The 0111 and the 1 is just so that Asterisk doesn’t think that both calls are to the same destination and then only make one call.

• That’s the basics, but you have to nail the timing just right. The timing is really important to do it the right way.

  —–Original Message—

• …

  Am I right in thinking call waiting isn’t a thing on US mobile networks then? In the UK, call waiting is pretty standard, and almost universally enabled by default on mobile networks. AIUI the same is true for much of Europe.

  Kind regards,

  Chris

• Not really, doing the way below you don’t even have to worry about it. They both go out at the same instant and as soon as it hits voicemail it disconnects the other leg.

  If you wanted you could leave it ringing for twenty minutes and it would still have the same effect.

  Kind regards,

  Matt

• Heh nah, call waiting still only allows one ringing event to happen at a time.

  If your phone is ringing and another comes in it will go to voicemail.

  Call waiting allows you to get notified of a call if you’re already on one, not multiple incoming at the same time.

• I remember doing the testing and two calls going out at the same time don’t actually have to go out at the *exact* same time. The remote end will pick up one of the two calls, but there is no guarantee which one it will be. Also, if you let the first call ring too long, yes, the second call will go to voicemail, but the first call will start ringing, which is something we wanted to avoid.

  John

  From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com] exten =>

  _X.,1,Dial(SIP/0111${EXTEN}@myprovider&SIP/1${EXTEN}@myprovider,3)

  Amazing. Who knew?

  So how/why does this work?

  I see 2 calls going out to my cell. Does the first ‘busy out’ my number at my cell provider so the second goes straight to VM? What part does the
  ‘0111’ play?

• there are providers which let you call directly to voicemail by using a prefix

• That’s the benefit of doing the & thing.

  The instant one of them goes to voicemail the other will stop ringing.

  Typing calls this happens in a few ms (after post dial delay).

  Because they are both going out at the same time with the same provider this is super quick.