How do I... Third party system creating a call from agent to customer?

[NicholasBarnes]

I have a customer whose CRM currently places calls to customers from agents - essentially their CRM (built in house) sends a message like "Make agent 123 call number 0123456789 and present caller ID 0987654321" to their PBX. The CRM does this by issuing a HTTP GET to their Asterisk system when it determines an agent needs to make a call. This GET runs a PHP script which then creates the call file for Asterisk to automatically process. Nice and easy and it just works.

The question is, how do I duplicate this functionality in 3CX? I can't see an obvious way.

To be clear, how can a remote system send 3CX a message saying "Place a call from Agent X to telephone number Y and presenting CallerID Z"?

Nicholas.

 

[NickD_3CX]

Hi!

At the time of writing, there is not a very straight forward way of doing this, but to create something similar with similar functionality, what you could do is:

1. Have your CRM create a file accessible somewhere by the 3CX Server (could also be accessible via HTTP GET or even a DB entry)
2. Install the 3CX Call Flow Designer (CFD) and create a new dialer project
3. This project would check every X seconds this file and depending on the entry content, make a call to the agent and once they answer, initiate the call to the external number
4. Load this CFD project into your 3CX and activate it by calling it once.

The only thing with this method is that I can't think of a way on how you can dynamically set the Outbound Caller ID, but if you have a set amount of available Outbound Caller IDs, you could certainly utilize the Outbound Rules, depending on the number dialed, to shows the equivalent CID.

 

[NicholasBarnes]

Thank you - I'll have a play with that. I take it you mean by using the outbound rules to set caller ID based on a prefix, so if for example the agent should be dialing 0123456789 on behalf of customer #65, the number should be prefixed something like 65*0123456789 and then an outbound rule looking for a number starting 65* would strip three digits and present caller ID X?

 

[NickD_3CX]

Thank you - I'll have a play with that. I take it you mean by using the outbound rules to set caller ID based on a prefix, so if for example the agent should be dialing 0123456789 on behalf of customer #65, the number should be prefixed something like 65*0123456789 and then an outbound rule looking for a number starting 65* would strip three digits and present caller ID X?

Exactly!