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We were sitting at lunch yesterday, and an interesting idea came up: a call center podcast.

We have a product that’s fairly young in its life cycle. It will likely be one of our corporate focus points in 2008, which is great because I really believe there’s a tremendous potential for the product.

As we move forward with this product, we need to know things like:

• How is our support staff is handling the calls on the product?
• How can we train support to be better?
• What is the topic of support calls?
• What is the (pre-sales) caller looking for in the product?
• And other marketing issues that this geek doesn’t really understand.

We record phone calls already, and they’re reviewed for things like training employees and improving our call center staff. For that we use Asterisk to record the calls to a .gsm file. (I can’t say enough about the awesomeness of Asterisk.)

I parse Asterisk’s queue log and store the records in a MySQL database. This allows me to look up information about calls and calculate things like average hold time, number of calls taken, average talk time per customer service representative. It lets us be proactive about customer service (which is always a good thing).

To do a podcast, I’d need to convert those .gsm files to .mp3 files. For that, I used SoX and LAME, whose command line awesomeness allows me to script the conversion of the files. So I do a SQL query to get the calls that came into that product’s queue, grab the .gsm file for each call, convert it to mp3 (if it hasn’t been converted already), and generate the XML for iTunes.

Now the appropriate management can just subscribe to that podcast (hosted internally on our network here) and be able to easily listen to those support calls. It’s quite cool.

Oh, and for anybody out there who’s looking for a way to use SoX and LAME to convert files from gsm to mp3, here’s the command I came up with:

sox -q filename.gsm -t wav -s -w - | lame –silent –resample 44.1 -h - filename.mp3