Changing outbound CID on-the-fly

Using Asterisk version 5.X with FreePBX version 2.7

My call center agents make outbound calls on behalf of our clients, who are dentists. When they make a call they need to appear as though they are calling from that dentists office and so we would like for them to be able to change the outbound CID on the fly.

I’m willing to pay for the custom development of a utility that will do this but I’ve been warned that it could become a problem.

I was told that the outbound CID is set in a flat file that would need to be reloaded each time it was updated in order for the changes to take effect. With several agents doing this several times a day, my source believes that this could create problems with our server.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks.

With FreePBX the outbound caller id is stored in the Asterisk DB as /AMPUSER/ext/outboundcid. You can use the database put command on the Asterisk CLI to change it on the fly. However you should update the FreePBX mySQL database so the FreePBX interface reflects the current outbound caller id. This is the same way the FreePBX voicemail interfaces updates dnd, call forward, and follow me settings. You could probably just add the outbound caller id field into the voicemail interface.

I would suggest the easiest supported option would be to make different routes for each client they are making calls for and then use the Outbound Caller ID option in the Outbound Routes.

This is the simple use of dial prefixes for each office, which will choose the given route and thus the give CID.

I like both of these suggestions…

I think the suggestion of the outbound routes and the use of dial prefixes will be the most manageable. This way we don’t need any custom software development nor special phones for the agents. We just need to keep a list of the prefixes and the client they correspond to…then any agent can make calls for any client.

Thank you very much.