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Few questions about Outbound calling

Questions and answers about IVR programming for Plum DEV

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tsswireless
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon May 11, 2015 12:16 pm

Few questions about Outbound calling

Post by tsswireless »

Hi,

I have following questions that will help me analyze if Plum Voice is the right solution for us.

1. Can the system detect if the phone number was fax or it went to voicemail?
2. If detectable and it goes to voicemail can the system record a message on the voicemail?
3. What are all the statuses/responses that I can receive from the receiving party after I call their line?

It would be great if someone can answer them.

Thanks,
TSS Wireless, Inc

support
Posts: 3632
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2003 3:47 pm
Location: Boston, MA
Contact:

Re: Few questions about Outbound calling

Post by support »

Hi,

We do have a 'callee type' detection, which is a best effort detection of the recipient of the call. The possible values for a callee type are:
on a successful call which is answered: voice, answeringmachine
on failure cases when the call was not answered: fax, busy, noanswer, operator

To give you an idea of how you would use callee type with outbound calls, which sounds like what you're looking to do, it would go something like the following:

1. Queue an outbound call with a start_url of your application
2. Plum platform will detect callee type
3. Plum platform will POST callee type along with all other parameters that are posted to your application start_url
4. In your application you can branch on the callee type as well as the other parameters that are submitted to your start_url

At this point, in your start_url script you could choose to branch on the posted callee_type in order to determine your calls flow dynamically. If an answering machine was detected, you could choose to play a message on a loop a number of times in order to leave a message. This is the simplest solution to leaving messages on answering machines as the duration of the mailbox message can vary from person to person.

A full description of the outbound process can be seen here:
http://www.plumvoice.com/docs/dev/plumd ... l_sequence

A full list of parameters that are sent to your start_url can be found here:
http://www.plumvoice.com/docs/dev/plumd ... l_callback

In regards to what statuses/responses can you receive from the receiving party after the call, for outbound calls you'll receive a number of parameters posted to your result_url, which you may specify when queuing the outbound call. The parameters that you will receive in the result_url are as follows:
phone_number, message_reference, call_id, result, callee_type, attempts, last_attempt_timestamp, and duration

Detailed descriptions about all of these parameters can be found here:
http://www.plumvoice.com/docs/dev/plumd ... l_callback

Hopefully that gives you a good idea about how to achieve what you're looking for, but please feel free to ask if you have any additional questions or anything needs further clarification.

Regards,
Plum Support

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