I need advice on call flow from experts.
We have hundreds of numbers on our SIP trunk.
Our inbound routes are used to figure out which office a caller was trying to reach, and we branch out to a specific IVR for the office.
The IVRs all use the same recording “Thanks for calling Company X. Calls may be recorded for quality and training purposes. Press 1 if you are a new customer, press 2 if you are an existing customer.”
The purpose for the two options is to route new customers to our call center, whereas existing customers usually want to talk directly to the office they called.
In our initial setup, pressing 1 would send you to the call center and eventually the call center voicemail if no one answered. Pressing 2 would send you to a ring group for the office and if no one answered it would send you to the office voicemail.
Then management wanted a change. When the call center was closed, pressing 1 would send you to the office.
We created a time group with the call center hours, and then we created a time condition for each office.
If the time condition matched, callers would go to the call center. If it didn’t match (call center closed), it would go to the office ring group.
Problem solved.
Now management has decided that the flow should work like this:
If the call center is open, new customers go there first, but get sent to the office if they are closed.
Existing customers go the office first, but if the office doesn’t answer or is closed, it tries the call center.
Here’s the catch. Office hours can vary from day to day and week to week. And then there’s things like bad weather.
They want the call center to have a day/night button, and the want each office to have a day/night button.
Taking the call center part of the example, Day/Night mode would normally be accomplished with a Call Flow Control. The ‘normal’ (green) mode would have a destination of the Call Center Queue. The ‘override’ (red) mode would go to the Office ring group.
…and there’s my problem. I seems I would have to create a ‘Call Center Flow Control’ for every office so the override mode could go back to a specific office ring group. In my case I’d need a 20-line phone to be able to display the 20 different day/night buttons.
Is there a way of accomplishing this with a single toggle? I haven’t touched an Asterisk dialplan since ~2002, but I’m thinking something along the lines of setting a variable when a call comes into a trunk for a specific office, then redirecting from a single Call Flow Control based on the variable?