You're Pre-Approved: Skype Switch board

This is a hack but probably a brilliant one for the first person that does it.

The scenario:

You have a web site and you want customers to call you with questions or a technical support questions, pre sales, etc.

You are a customer and don’t want to tie up the phone dialing anything, toll-free or not. Or you are in a hotel that charges for toll free calls.

The Skype Switchboard

You have a button on your web site that says Skype me. User presses the button and they, via Skype, not SkypeOut, is dropped into your technical support or customer service phone system. The customer has no local/long distance charge, nor do you with the toll-free line.  And the call is fed into your normal switchboard/PBX, etc.

As I said, that’s a hack that should be reasonably easy to do and probably, via Asterisk which makes the whole thing open source. 

Once you have that, the cool features can start. Instead of you waiting on the phone, you are in the queue and the system, via skype pops up when  a rep is ready to talk with you. You add a number of features like detecting presence, screen sharing, and all the support stuff so that the customer’s experience is an amazing one.

I suspect the whole thing can be hosted and even those companies with older PBX systems could integrate this via some Dialogic hardware or others.

This has all kinds of possibilities. One button on my task bar for pizza pizza or wild wings. Drops me right into the ordering system so I can place my order without my hands ever leaving the keyboard. One reason why I love this Toshiba Satellite Tablet PC, it’s amazing mic/speakers built right in.

Lots of possibilities.  As Mark Evans will surely confirm, Bell Canada is probably already thinking of this. Right.

 

Comments

[Alec Saunders]

Trivial.

Get Skype 1.4, then use Tools / Options / Voice Mail and Call Forwarding to forward the skype caller to your PSTN number at your expense.

No... it's not free for you the business owner, yet, but if you visit the SkypeJournal, you'll read that Bill Campbell is playing with a Skype / PSTN router that can take a Skype call and route it to your PBX.

Next?

[Jim Courtney]

Gosh, this sounds awfully close to
the discussion Stuart Henshall [http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c7bfb1da-2a3b-11da-b890-00000e2511c8.html]
and I had at VON on Wednesday. Stuart feels there is more value for developers building applications around this concept if Skype would invoke "Call Transfer" which he differentiates as close to but not exactly Call Forwarding.

[Alec Saunders]

Yup - I had the same conversation with Stuart. You wouldn't need the PBX in the picture at all if Skype implemented a few of these APIs.

[Alex Barnett]

Nice idea. It is taking the IM for live call center chat idea and adding voice. Sweet.