sorry for length of post but figured, i’d describe in detail how we currently work so you experts can throw ideas at me.
have a distribution center organizing for a multitude of trucking companies.
we basically have a simple system where I have a phone number assigned to each company so when a call comes in on a particular DID, i have system/phones programmed to show the name of the trucking company being called so we know which company we’re setting this order up for.
right now we simply and for many many years just have clipboards for each company that has their specific rules for handling each call and actually who is the on-call driver at that particular time. some companies change their on call driver each day, some once a week, some once every 2 weeks. we just write down on the calendar on each clipboard who is the on call driver for each day.
the problem is that we have to be at our office working to physically look at the clipboards.
I want to have it so we can do away with this and have all this stuff in the cloud, mostly so we can work remotely using soft phones on computers
I have setup a cloud based freepbx install and started to configure it. what I would like is for when a call comes in on a DID:
it says the name of the trucking company assigned to that DID
who is the current on-call driver
hopefully a few lines of their main rules
for the most part the only thing we would be constantly changing and hopefully ez to change would be who the current on call driver is when they call us to change who it is. and also not sure if there’s a way to change this on call driver without logging into the pbx system as I dont want to give our workers that kind of access to the new system.
not sure if freepbx has modules that would do this or would need some sort of CRM integration.
any and all advice would be much appreciated! Thx much!
You can create one queue for each company and direct the specific DID to its queue, making use of the option for the queue to display a specific prefix, which you would use to set the trucking company name.
For on-call rotation, you could use one calendar for each on-call truck driver and set an inbound route to check each of the calendars by “cascading” time conditions, where each time condition would check one specific calendar and if not matched, cascade into the next time condition and so on.
That would be an overall description.
I have implemented a similar solution for a travel agency that provides support to different companies and have different on-call support agents.
If you need further info, just feel free to ask.
ok thx much for answer…we have like 600 drivers, thats a lot of calenders to create. would the system even allow that?
also we’re growing by leaps and bounds over past year so many more drivers will be consistently added, thats why im looking to upgrade us to something that makes us more efficient
is there something similar to the calendar thing where the DID/queue could pull the current driver name from a database or spreadsheet? that way I could just have me/whoever working just select the current on-call name and hit save?
600 calendars: Doable, yes. Practical, probably not so much.
I’m currently doing it for 20 different calendars and it works as expected. It was a pain to configure it initially, but after that, not a single issue.
The database search sounds like a very good way of doing it, you could load the name, phone number and company of all the drivers and then select the on-call driver according to some logic that you would need to design in case you want to automate the on-call rotation.
Or you could assign unique ID codes for each driver and design a feature code where each driver is in charge of dialling when they start their on-call shift, so they can dial the feature code and their unique ID code in order to set the on-call phone number to be called.
Indeed there is. You would have to buy the commercial CRM module. You would also need to buy the CRM software, taking care of choosing one that is compatible with the CRM module.
thats actually where I get lost is which CRM should we go with? there’s so many to choose from
in my mind this seems rather simplistic that we would not need to break the bank with a giant CRM subscription. but I dont know those CRM players enough to investigate which would be a fit for us.
If you don’t need any specific feature and all of the supported CRMs seem the same to you, I guess you can go with the cheapest one that covers what you need.
I’m personally not using any paid one, so I’m afraid I’m not in a position to make any recommendations, besides what I said before.