CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

We are using it to call our members, the workflow is as follow:

1) search for contacts and reserve a bunch of them (we limited to 20)
- sorrow point: this search is completely unuseful for us, we don't need criteria on the address, but would have like to be able to search on the gender or other custom fields. I'd love to have the "reserve" as a batch action, ie. so I can use whatever existing search

2) search for the reserved ones
- sorrow point: this step is not useful for us, as we are always going to try to call all the 20

3) conduct the interview
The ajax interface in nice and well thought (it would have been better to use the ajax/rest, but I digress)
I modified the template to add a link "register", as the goal of the phone calls are to register the persons to an event
- sorrow point: I didn't find an easy way to trigger an action based on the survey value. I would have liked to automatically open the event registration if the value is "Yes, will attend"

Point of detail: it would have be nice to be able to link a value to the status of the activity. Eg "Yes, will attend->completed" "No one home"->"Left a message"...

Lastly on a previous life was working for a call center and the interface for interviews was dumbed down: click "want a new call", it automatically opens the survey form+a summary of the contact (how to choose the next contact to "reserve" was based on rules), fill the survey and click on "save and get a new one", and start again.

Might be that we need to workflow, the existing one for on foot canevassing and a new by phone one

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(bonus point we were integrated with the phone system and could make the call directly).

3. When we did the school auction workflow, one of the missing elements was a place to add notes / keep it on queue but add a few details, like:
a. called and left a message, will follow up in a few days
b. called and spoke to X, who told me to call Y in 3 days

Yeap, and exposing the subject or note of the activity should be enough to cover that.

4. Yes, i do think for phonebanking we need a different interface and also integration with a VOIP SaaS provider like twilio or tropo. Basically would rock to have Click2Call functionality in CiviCRM and i do think we have most of the pieces built for this already

I have a customer that have an interface with asterisk for that

We have created a smarty plugin "formatphone" that basically replaces the number by <a href="clicktodial?phone={$number}" title="click here to dial">{$number}

To make it easier to integrate with any phone solution, having a "OO Hook" (cf my proposal about the organisation fetch/dedupe) is the right solution IMO.

the default object does nothing on the formating, the tropo one relaces with whatever url is needed...

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