During the last year we have been quite busy working on a number of themes that made WombatDialer better and more useful, so we thought we’d better share them with you.

The first theme we addressed is improved flexibility in dialing to agents.

A number of users asked for ways for agents to be already connected when the callee is rung. This led to the development of Reverse Dialing and Reverse Stepwise Dialing.

With Reverse Dialing, the agent is rung first and then the call is attempted. This makes sure that when the callee answers, the agent is already on-line and ready to talk.
The agent must be a member of an Asterisk queue, so that we get presence information (log in, log out, pauses and current status) right out of Asterisk.
This also lets you share an agent on multiple queues with different dialing policies.

With Reverse Stepwise Dialing, we go a bit further - we use an API so that an agent can reserve a call, preview it and decide whether to actually dial it or to mark it as processed without dialing. If the agent does not want the call processed, you can reschedule it or mark it as not to be processed.
If the agent does not make a decision within 10 minutes from reserving, the call is put back into the dialing pool.
All call variables are passed to the agent, so you can display them or link to an external CRM.

The second theme is security - we added a security model that matches the one used by QueueMetrics, so that you can make different trunks, end-points, campaigns and list visible to some users only.
This also affects Live viewing and campaign reporting and will make WombatDialer completely multi-tenant (like QueueMetrics is).

After this, we addressed two major themes - AMD/Fax detection and Black lists / Robinson lists.

For AMD/Fax, we used the facilities Asterisk offers in order to detect whether the call is answered by an Answering Machine or by a fax machine.
This has the major advantage of not tying you to a specific solution, but lets you use a plethora of third party modules that are available for Asterisk in case you should find the default ones not good enough for you.
WombatDialer will run the channel detection scripts and will react by sending either a pre-recorded message (for AMD) or a fax page in case no human caller is detected.

As per black lists, we offer a way to check numbers against a set of internal lists.
A number will be checked against all lists for a campaign and will be processed only if all call lists allow it.

We released these features: Reverse, Reverse Stepwise, AMD/Fax and black lists management, according to customer requests and indications.
We have a Suggestions forum on UserEcho at http://wombatdialer.userecho.com where you can propose new improvements and vote on what other people proposed, so make sure your voice is heard!

If you are a new user and would like to test all the new features and benefits offered by WombatDialer feel free to request a 30 days trial with 100 channels at https://www.wombatdialer.com/requestDemoKey.jsp.

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