Anyone want to have a conversation?

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your detailed response.

It is true, a IVR, or heavier use of the DID's would be a much easier system for the receptionist.

However, in our company, employee's often receive phone calls that they don't wish to receive, or that distract them from their work. Having the receptionist available to screen those calls, traditionally has been a positive thing.

I'm trying to stay true to the old PBX systems method of operation and our companies "values", however I realize that may not be possible.

I'm not closed to modifying how we manage calls, but I'd still like to continue exploring the limits of the asterisk based system.

thx247,
I am guessing that your previous system had multiple different buttons where the various calls appeared which somehow kept your receptionist able to distinguish among them when 2-5 came in at once. What type of phone equipment are you deploying for the receptionist and how many different call positions does she have to work with? I also like the idea for some expansion modules and BLFs that Chris brought up.

Going forward, it would seem prudent to look to see what management thinks growth in the company might be. I have some serious doubt that this answer, discuss, park / transfer, and page system will scale much higher before you need 2 telephone receptionists taking incoming calls. That is where I think Chris is heading with the queues suggestion. Not knowing anything else about your company, could you create some audio content (self promoting commercials of varying lengths) to keep your callers attention while they are in the queue?

The more I think about it, the more I like the queue approach because it offers a few benefits over the ring group that I mentioned in my first reply. in a queue situation, you can have agents (receptionists) sign in and out as needed to take care of high call volume. You can play the commercials to your callers while they are in queue. ANYBODY who knows the queue number and password can sign in to the queue so you are much more flexible on having receptionists scattered all around the office.

I like the loyalty to the old values, but if you implement a new system and fail to use the new features available, then the question becomes why did you go through the acquisition and implementation in the first place? Perhaps you should take these suggestions and sit down with management and ask them to think about the options and reach a decision over the course of time. Offer to implement some of these solutions--none are real hard to do--and let management try different ones to see how the company, and your callers, react to the different options.

Greg

Greg and Vtofa,

Yes I agree that conversation with the receptionist and managers is in order.

The receptionist actually does more than just answer the phones, often she is running around the office with the portable phone, fielding calls, preparing the conference room, making copies and so on. She is a very busy lady to say the least. Call management software would be ideal to handle this situation, but it would tie her to her desk. She is using a 57iCT with 560M extension module. She has enough keys to setup anything she needs, but the issue is she doesn't always use this phone, she could be in the kitchen, the break room, the accounting offices...she's always running around to different phones.

I need to think about how a call queue would work. I suppose the receptionist could put calls as she answers them into a queue, announce the caller and confirm whether the call goes through to the person or to their voicemail. But then she may as well place the call in the parking lot. The parking lot almost is more functional since I assume she can pull whatever call out of the lot that she wants (say an important caller) instead of pulling the callers out of the queue in the order they called in.

To emulate the key based system more, I'm considering this.

Setup the top keys (55i's) with BLF lights for the parking lot. 1-5 can be parking slots, button 6 can be an intercom or a speeddial park key.

The receptionist answers calls, and places them in the parking lot using a speeddial parking lot key. (The current "park" key requires hanging up the handset which takes too much time) As she places calls in the parking lot, she can visually confirm that the call made it to the slot with the topkey BLF lights. Then its just an issue of paging the person to pickup the call.

If many calls come in at once she can answer then and put them on hold...then return to the call and put them in parking before making a transfer.

The problem we're having is that too often calls get placed in parking (or don't make it there) and the receptionist and employee's don't recall where the calls went.

I didn't think it would be an issue, but apparently it is.

Its not efficient what we're doing, but it also insulates the employee's from having to take calls they can't manage at that particular moment and provides a human for the callers to speak to (which is important for both the callers, and for us- see earlier reason)

If I could pull calls off Park faster - currently when you press a park button to pickup a call there is a second or so delay - then I could probably live with this system.

There is a slight pickup delay with the Aastra 480i I'm using - it takes about a second to dial the DTMF digits (101 in my case). Why not have the users dial the park code directly instead of using the Parking xml script? If you add your park digits to the dial plan of the Aastra phones the park pickup will happen as fast as they can dial "71" (or whatever your park prefix is).

Sky,

Local hold would work fine if the receptionist transferred calls directly to our employees. Since she has to put the callers on hold in a place where she can direct employees to pickup, it needs to be a globally accessible parking lot, or line appearances.

I'm trying to think of a place where I can write a post, or a website which details the research I've done on all the various systems and issues with VoIP I've run across in the past 9 months. While our system is very unique, there are a lot of very competitive systems to Trixbox, and services. Like AT&T offering a T1 line with 23 channels for the same as you can get 12 channels from Bandwidth.com (or any other SIP host)

Hi Fred,

We still need shared lines appearances so that once calls are answered, the receptionist can page or intercom the employee's with which line to pickup.

Hi Imagehq,

Unfortunately, we were not able to fully resolve our issues. There was a delay when parking calls and pulling calls off of park. I'm not sure if it was the size of the system, some network gremlin or just a bad configuration somewhere.

The phone problems were later resolved by using a key based VoIP system that NEC produces. Since then, I've had nothing but good results from the phones and phone system. There is a delay when paging all phones which I hope that NEC will address (it builds a connection to each phone instead of the Aastra multicast method) but the majority of what we do - answer lots of calls quickly and page extensions is quick now so the delay when paging is overlookable.

I need to sell my Aastra phones now, we have a ton of them with only 3 months of use.