Overview

Voicent Gateway is a VoiceXML gateway server. It supports both inbound and outbound applications. This tutorial covers advanced topics that is related to outbound applications. It is assumed you have studied the basic Gateway Tutorial already.

Here we are going to develop an automated customer satisfactory survey application for an automobile service shop. This simple application will do the following:

1. Read from a list of customers who have bring their car for service
   
   We are going to randomly select customer name, phone number, date of the service, and the maker of the car. The idea should be the same if you are using a database for the customer list.
    
2. Automatically call these customers and collect their ratings (1-5) on the service provided
   
   The survey message: "Hi, this is ACME car service calling [customer name]. We have provided your car [maker of the car] for maintenance service on [date of the service]. Please rate our service by number 1 to 5, with 5 being the best. Thank you for your time."
   
   Since it cannot collect any feedback from an answering machine, the answering machine message is: "Hi, this is ACME car service calling [customer name]. We have provided your car [maker of the car] for maintenance service on [date of service], we'd like to thank you for your business and please contact us if we can be further help."
    
3. Produce a survey report
   
   We want to know how many calls made, how many calls are answered by answering machine, whether the line is busy, and how many customers rated the service on each rating scale.

The topics covered in this tutorial are:

• Schedule an outbound call
• Outbound call control flow
• Play different messages for live human pickup and answering machine
• Using dynamically generated VXML files
• Know which key has been pressed
• Get line status: line busy, line occupied, no answer, hang up, etc
• Know which customer record the gateway is requesting
• The survey start page
• The survey report page
• The sample package