julie July 27th, 2010

Leslie Conway, vice president of global marketing

Congratulations to Leslie Conway, vice president of global marketing, who has been recognized by Everything Channel’s CRN magazine as one of the top Women of the Channel. CRN’s annual list recognizes female executives across vendors’ channel organizations, distributors and solution providers for their accomplishments over the past year and the far-reaching impact they are having on the technology industry going forward. This year’s Women of the Channel were chosen by the editors of CRN magazine based on their achievements as executives and the amount of influence they wield over the technology channel.

Over the past year, Conway led efforts that substantially expanded Digium’s channel in size and geographic reach. She launched a major partner recruitment effort that resulted in a 40 percent increase in Digium’s partner base, bringing it to more than 500 channel partners, and established relationships with numerous distribution partners and resellers in the UK, Middle East and Australia for Digium’s Switchvox unified communications solution. She also developed programs and processes that yielded significant leads for top-level partners, while focusing on partner lifecycle management to help Digium better understand partner needs.

Congratulations Leslie!

Digium’s award-winning Partner Program is designed to help partners profitably grow their business with an affordable alternative for business phone systems. If you are still considering adding IP Telephony to your portfolio, consider Digium’s Switchvox unified communications system.

See for yourself why Digium’s Partner Program is the one for you! Watch the Webcast now.

• Digium
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Malcolm Davenport July 26th, 2010

Howdy,

Digium is pleased to announce the beta availability of Asterisk 1.8. Asterisk 1.8, the next major release of Asterisk, is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release and will be fully supported for 4 years, with an additional year of security-only fixes. For more information about support timelines for Asterisk releases, see the Asterisk versions page:

http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk-versions

A short list of new features that are a part of Asterisk 1.8 includes:

• Secure RTP (SRTP)
• IPv6 Support
• Connected Party Identification Support
• Calendaring Integration for CalDAV, iCal, Exchange or EWS calendars
• A new call logging system, Channel Event Logging (CEL)
• Distributed Device State, including Message Waiting Indicator using Jabber/XMPP PubSub
• Call Completion Supplementary Services (CCSS) Support, including Call Completion on Busy Subscriber (CCBS) and Call Completion on No Response (CCNR)
• Advice of Charge, including AOC-S, AOC-D, and AOC-E Support
• and much, much more!

A full list of new features can be found in the CHANGES file.

How can you help?

By testing, testing and more testing! We need your help finding bugs so that 1.8 is the best release possible. To help, download the beta:

http://www.asterisk.org/downloads/asterisk/releases/asterisk-1.8.0-beta2.tar.gz

Build and install it, and test, test, test!

Report all issues to our issue tracker:

https://issues.asterisk.org

Thank you for your assistance and for your continued support of Asterisk!

• Digium
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Allison Smith July 26th, 2010

Allison Smith, The Asterisk Voice

The 15 Commandments of IVR

Commandment #4: Always Give Callers An “Opt-In”

We’ve built a solid foundation of the first three Commandments of IVR so far: we’ve promised to *Never* Overestimate Your Listener’s Attention Span (which, we’ve established, is considerably shorter than you might think…); we’ve vowed to not create fake mailboxes to make our companies sound grander than they really are; and to that end, we’ve pledged our undying goal to Keep Things Simple. We’re well on our way to building IVR systems which people will happily follow to the letter and joyfully obey every instruction!
Not so fast.

Today, we’ll explore the idea that even the best-designed IVR systems need a “safety switch”; a cut-off valve that will – in essence – enable callers to bail out of the menu at any time. In case people just don’t want to “play”, I’ve created Commandment #4: Always Give Callers An Opt-In.
Jim Van Meggelen, Asterisk wonk extraordinaire – and one of my “IVR Dojos” puts it best: “Your callers are not obligated to follow your script. If they get frustrated, they will either dial ‘0’ or hang up. Put most commonly used selections first,” he recommends.

It makes perfect sense: because you’re already committed to keeping things as simple as possible, to enable people to be sorted into the right “category” for service, it just makes sense to offer only the most widely used options. To offer the most *probable* options first. And to track how many people dump out altogether and select “0”. Jim adds: “A good IVR system will keep track of what choices were made (or not made). Use these reports to tweak your call flow. Note that if a large percentage of callers are pressing ‘0’. That is a sign that your IVR is not serving the needs of the caller.”
Jim recommends handling callers dialing ‘0’ by connecting them to a live operator rather than a more detailed sub-directory. “They’ve pressed ‘0’ for one of two reasons: 1) They want to talk to somebody live, or 2) Your IVR did not present them with the options they need. Either way, unless you want to upset and alienate your callers, you need to get them to a human being.”

The point we’re trying to get across: in a perfect world, *one* IVR option out a small selection will help every caller. It’s an imperfect world, so there must be a plan to address the eventuality that none of the options might be pertinent to your customer. Rather than have them opt out – hanging up and moving on to your competitor – let’s install an escape hatch…but one that is traceable; one that measures how many people had to resort to using it, and arrive at solutions of how to manage callers through a touch-key option instead of wearing out that ‘0’ button.
As only he can, Jim sums it up perfectly: “Do not try to change the callers. Instead change your IVR.”

Next installment in the “15 Commandments of IVR” series is one of my favorites – and one which I see violated almost every day in my job of voicing IVR scripts: #5:” Front-Load Important Information.”

Thanks for reading, and as always, your comments are encouraged and appreciated!

• Digium
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julie July 21st, 2010

• Channel , Digium , Switchvox , Training
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roderickm July 14th, 2010

Thanks to the Old Spice guy Isaiah Mustafa, Asterisk fans are now chopping up a video and piecing together new outgoing messages for their personal voicemail. If you still chuckle any time you hear a deep voice say, “I’m on a horse,” then you’ll probably enjoy his resonant recitation of useful words for voicemail recordings.

Now please excuse me while I get back to my audio editor.

• Asterisk , Community
• Comments(3)