how to manually trigger a prerecorded message to play then hang up

[hodor]

when on 3cx softphone i need for my users to be able to send a call to a prerecorded message then hang up.

basically its us calling our customers and if we get their voicemail, i want us to be able to play a prerecorded message and then hang up automatically.

so like if when the voicemail beeps to start leaving a message instead of having my crew butcher leaving a voicemail they could send the call to a extension or queue or whatever that would play the prerecorded message and then hang up auto after playing. thx much

 

[VoIPTools]

You could create an IVR, one for each different voicemail you want to play. When the agent hears the contact's voicemail box "beep" they could transfer the call to the correct IVR extension. But depending on the number of different voicemails you need, that might become challenging to easily remember which extension goes with which extension.

However, there may be a better way. I encourage you to take a look at our 3CX Auto Voicemail tool. It was created for your exact need.



You access our tool via a simple web interface. On the web page is a list of pre-recorded voicemails. When you hear the beep, you select the desired voicemail and it immediately drops the agent's call, and has 3CX leave the voicemail for you. This approach, as you have already concluded, can save a lot of time and the tedious experience of leaving the same voicemail 100 times.

You can either record and share system-wide recorded voicemails, or the agent can record the voicemails themselves in their own voice, or use both. Because these are pre-recorded, you have the opportunity to get the message exactly right. I don't know about you, but recording prompts for IVRs or recording voicemails is a multi-attempt effort. I never get it just right the first time, or perhaps even the 5th time. So this solution ensures you have a consistent, carefully crafted, voicemail, with the perfect "tone" every time.

But even better, how about use OpenAI to generate the voicemail for you using text-to-speech? True, it is not in the agent's actual voice, but it does hugely simplify the recording of the voicemail by eliminating the multi-attempt problem with trying to record the prompt just the way you want it.

Before you discount the usefulness of text-to-speech, let me give you an example of what is possible with OpenAI. Without reservation, I can confidently say the days of robotic-sounding text-to-speech are completely gone forever. I personally cannot recognize the difference between an AI generated voicemail and a human. Take a listen to the attached file.

 

[edossantos_sipcaller]

Hello @hodor,

You could use SIP Caller to call your customers, wait for them to pick up, automatically detect if who answers is a human or an answering machine, and then:
- On answering machine: automatically play a prompt to leave the message in their voicemail.
- On human answer, transfer the call immediately to the agent, so they can speak with the customer.

Also, by using the predictive dialer feature, you will automatically adjust the calling pace to the availability of your agents.

 

[VoIPTools]

Let me say that I am a huge advocate of Ernesto's work and encourage you to take a look at his SIP Caller tool. That may seem a little strange given that we do have competing dialers. But, my participation in the forums is not just about spamming people about our commercial tools. So I'm genuinely curious when I ask @edossantos_sipcaller, with the inclusion of AI in just about everything we do these days, how is the accuracy of voicemail detection today?

In the past (going back 10+ years) the accuracy of voicemail detection was "hit-or-miss" at best. I will point out that 3CX has historically been unable to perform voicemail detection because we, as programmers, could never get access to the live audio stream. Without Ernesto's tool, there is no ability to perform any voicemail detection with 3CX.

However, it does appear that will be changing in the future as 3CX starts sharing live audio with AI. It's on the stated 3CX roadmap. Looking at some of the new 3CX APIs, it may be possible today. I just cannot seem to find the time to dive into some of these new APIs and test. Has anyone else had time to use some of these new APIs for this purpose?

 

[edossantos_sipcaller]

So I'm genuinely curious when I ask @edossantos_sipcaller, with the inclusion of AI in just about everything we do these days, how is the accuracy of voicemail detection today?

Hey Matt, there are different ways of doing this. Some rely on speech recognition and detecting specific phrases. Others are based on the salutation length. In any case you need access to the audio stream. We can do this because we connect to 3CX using SIP & RTP and not using any of the APIs exposed. In our case we implemented an algorithm that tries to identify an answering machine by measuring the average energy received during a period of time, detecting periods of speech and silence, and based on this we decide. There are always false positives, specially when the callee is in a noisy environment. But overall the result is really good and this saves a lot of time to the agents that are taking these calls.

 

[hodor]

thx for the replies but I'm not ready to go the AI route quite yet. I want to be simple and make sure that our customer gets the full message properly. for now it's only one message that I've already recorded. im thinking the VOIP tools may be overkill for what I attempting to do. but curious as to the price is that per user or per organization where all my users would have access to it?

but if I just want to use the vanilla 3cx install...when my crew goes to call that customer if they happen to get the voicemail, i can have them wait for the beep then transfer to an single IVR extension that will just play the message and hang up. the thought is that the customers will think its me actually calling them and leaving the message and not sound like a prerecorded setup.

ive listened to some of them leaving messages and it's cough's and "um's" and background noises on too many voicemails so I want to clean it up. thx again!

 

[edossantos_sipcaller]

By using SIP Caller you will not just leave the message when the voicemail finishes playing the beep, but you will also improve your agents' performance, saving their valuable time for meaningful conversations. Your agents will not need to wait on the phone, listening to the ring-back tone until the customer picks up. You can engage them just when there is a customer on the other side of the line, managing everything else automatically.

Not sure what's the answer rate when you manually call your customers, but just to give you an idea, we have customers that have seen a 5X increase in agents' performance after using our predictive dialer, compared to manual dialing. That means, all the calls that previously took them 8 hours of agents' time, now can be completed in less than 2 hours. This case is for a customer having a low answer rate (around 25%), so SIP Caller also helps discarding all those unanswered calls.

You can try SIP Caller for free, the setup is extremely easy, you can be making calls in 5 minutes.

 

[hodor]

appreciate the heads up on SIP Dialer but I'm thinking its also overkill for what I'm trying to achieve.

Our customers almost always answer, it's more like 75% or more of the time we're speaking with them and thus not needing to transfer to prerecorded message. And we're not talking about a lot of calls so I'm not as worried about efficiency as I am getting a good well spoken message to our clients voicemails from now on.

I created an IVR just now and tested it and it worked. however when i hit the "transfer" button on softphone it started playing that hold music and when it hung up the system said in a woman's voice "good bye"

i would like to turn off both of those from occurring, so no hold music while typing in the IVR extension after hitting transfer and I dont want the system to say good bye in a voice that's not mine, i already have that in my recording.

thx much!

 

[edossantos_sipcaller]

Try with BLF keys, just I touch and the call is blindly transferred.