Usecase: After Sales Follow up Call

This time I want to share with you another application which were we asked to develop as an add-on on our SAARA platform. A company doing online sales wanted to make an automated call after customer made a purchase, play an automated greeting and asked to value the service they provided. Very simple, however, not something which you can find in a regular PBX or IP PBX.

The solution was, of course, to use our script-driven telephony engine. Initially it was designed with an inbound voice call in mind, i. e. it would be waiting for a call to arrive, and then, based on the number dialed, would trigger a script which would execute tasks according to the script. This case called for a slight modification of the process: the script would be triggered not by inbound call, but by request made to RESTful API endpoint. The request which technically looks like this:

It is send by customers e-commerce server, and contains a number to dial, and language in which the messages should be played.

Once the end party picks up the phone, script finds the appropriate media file, and plays it. After message is played, user is asked to value service, either by pressing a numeric key, or speaking a number between 1 to 9 by voice. The script accepts both options.

How the result is processed further, depends on the preference of customer. In the given scenario, the results were stored in the local database of the script engine, and customer downloaded then manually from the web interface when it was necessary. However, there are many other options:

1. If the sale volume is not high, it is possible to email the results, and attach voice file to the email;
2. If real-time information is necessary, the script can send the results to the customers servers by API call;
3. It is also to possible to decode a voice message by speech recognition engine before sending therefore reducing manual work to almost none. (More about speech recognition in later posts).
4. Additionally, an SMS can be sent to customer in the case the call could not be completed.

Important is to note, that the outbound call is routed via DTL SAARA regular routing engine, therefore correct authentication and billing is always performed. The customer can set up their preferred carriers for specific countries or networks, and also apply black lists to specific destinations, to block potentially fraudulent calls to premium rate service. And since DTL SAARA is a real-time system, customer credit limits are also always enforced.