Automatic Google Lookups For Inbound Calls with 3CX Assistant

Have you ever thought that it might be nice if you could know who is calling you when the phone rings? What if you could automatically do a Google search whenever a call comes in. With the 3CX Assistant, you can do exactly this. While this feature was intended to work with a CRM application, we can get a little creative and pop open a website to do a basic search function.

Creating a Batch File

The first step is to create a DOS batch file that will call the browser of your choice and pass the caller id information to it in order for Google to do a lookup. Once you create the file, save it some place like c:\temp\googleit.bat.

Chrome
In the following example, replace <username> with the actual user name on your system.

@echo off
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe http://www.google.com/search?q=%1%

Firefox

@echo off
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" http://www.google.com/search?q=%1%

Internet Explorer

@echo off
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://www.google.com/search?q=%1%

Setting up the 3CX Assistant

in the 3CX Assistant, go to the File menu and select Preferences. Check the box for “Notify external program on incoming call” and then click on the “…” button to browse to your batch file you created. Once you select “Ok” your 3CX Assistant will now do a Google search on the phone number that calls you.

Summary

While this is just a simple example of what you can do, there are quite a few different possibilities for using this with other web based applications or even regular applications if they can accept a command line parameter. Using this function you could automatically open a trouble ticket system, log calls into a database, and many other useful functions.

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Tags: 3CX, Assistant, CRM, Google, Integration