Please dial * now

I've been looking at Asterisk this week—even before the Asterisk story on /. today.

At work I've built a fairly sophisticated online survey/research tool. Just last fall we used it to conduct various customer-related research projects that in the past we'd have paid an outside research firm on the order of $300,000 to do.

I've been thinking of how to broaden our reach. We can conduct customer satisfaction surveys online only of those customers who are online—which admittedly is most, but not all. And even among those who have internet access a web-based survey might not appeal to them because they don't like hitting [Submit] repeatedly or something.

Certainly not the only company that conducts customer satisfaction surveys by phone, but I was reminded this week that The Olive Garden restaraunts give some randomly selected subsection of their customers a 1-800 and a "survey code". If the customer calls in and completes the automated phone survey they'll get a coupon for a free dessert they can use on their next visit.

I'm especially intrigued of the possibilities because there are ways to program Asterisk in Tcl. One of Tcl's great strengths as a programming language is that you can develop working functional prototypes very rapidly. So it would be easy to experiment with a lot of different approachs in short order.

Cade points out that for less than $200 you can get some hardware to start playing with...

—Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 12, 2005 at 18:51