I wanted to ask for suggestions on an issue a client is having.
They have about 10 extensions, all of which are at the same site. Two people are the primary receptionists for incoming calls in a doctor’s office. Those two people are sometimes on calls, sometimes checking people in, sometimes caring for other matters. They have five incoming channels, although it’s rare for them to use all five. If the two receptionists are busy, whether that’s on the phone or helping someone else, they’re obviously not able to take a call. They are also NOT able to login or logout as agents due to the frequent change in their availability.
I realize what a call queue is designed for; this situation may not exactly be a fit for the call queue. They would like calls that are unanswered after 20 seconds to go into a queue (a holding pattern.) That queue would ring them again in 60 seconds to check for availability. However, if they are on the phone and finish up before that 60 seconds is up, they would like to pickup the call in the queue. From what I’ve researched, there is no specific function that would allow for this. The available receptionist would have to wait for the 60 seconds to expire before they would be able to pickup the queued call. One reason I like the call queue idea is because after a certain amount of time, they can prompt the caller to accept the option to be transferred to the office’s answering service.
I’m looking for potential suggestions. The only other option I considered was park and page. If someone was on the phone, reception would hear the page in the background and know to pickup the parked call when they were available.
The OPs problem is that the agents appear available, but they are not really available, and it is too much work, for the agent, to actively indicate they are not available, or have become available.
I assume that you are referring to pressing the button on the phone is kind of a hard to remember to do every time they are checking in someone and then again when they are free.
Here’s my question. Is there some soft of start and end process that they anyway do?
I will give you an example. We have clients that when the user locks/logs out of their computer, it pauses their extension across all queues, and when they log back in they get un-paused.
You could do the same thing with an IOT device that detects when they sit on their chair etc etc etc…
Finally, you can add a BLF button to indicate if there’s a call waiting in the queue.
Of course, these are stuff that don’t exist out of the box.