Multiple “night modes”

FreePBX Configuration
1

Hello,
I am working on setting up a system in which they need to have multiple options for night modes. Due to the nature of the business that we run we answer the phone with a live person 24/7 365. We have 4 employees that have ip phones in their homes and I have set up a total of 5 queues (one for each person who takes calls at night and one that routes to the office for during the day). I am trying to figure out how to set it up so that one of five dial codes could be dialed that would result in calls being routed to that queue. Any suggestions?

2

The more conventional way to accomplish this is to have a single queue, and your dynamic queue agents manage their queue login (or pause) so only the on-duty agent is the only one receiving calls.

3

Unfortunately in this environment that will not work. Each queue has the persons cell phone and home phones in it. Additionally we need to be able to change it without it being done by the end person at times (we work in emergency services) when running out of the office we need to be able to just dial a code (will be a blf speed dial key on the office phones) to send calls to someone who we know is available but don’t necessarily have time to call them and wait for them to get logged in.

4

OK so a few things here.

  1. How do the five cell phones and home phones log into the queue? Wouldn’t you have these just as static agents so that the person doesn’t have to log in? More importantly they don’t have to log in two devices/agents into the queue.

  2. Why are calls going to a cell phone along with their IP Phone? The queue cannot track the state of a PSTN number (cell/landline/etc) so it will never know when they are on a call and just continue to send calls to the agent because it sees two available agents.

  3. Having both their IP phone and the cell phone as agents in the queue means there is always at least one free agent when calls come to them. So doesn’t matter which device they have the call on. The queue will continue to send them new calls while on the phone because it sees available agents. And as pointed out in #2, a PSTN number can’t have a PSTN device state tracked so it can send a call to the cell phone when they are already on it.

  4. Despite all of the above, this is going to require you to write custom dialplan for your queue changing as nothing in the GUI has something with multiple options for the same Call Flow Control like this.

5

The only way to do this in the GUI is to daisychain call flow controls. But that means which ever ones first if it’s turned on nothing else matters. But it will get the job done if that’s all you want.

6

Thanks for the reply!

To address the things you mentioned

  1. They are in as static agents. The queue is functioning as more of a ring group (the call volume is very low there is rarely more than one call at a time, even more so at night).
    2&3. This is the desired behavior as there is only one person, in the very rare event that there is more than one call at a time, the same person would be responsible for answering both calls using hold or call waiting.
  2. Okay, thats what I was afraid of.

Thank you!

7

Right and put them on two devices. If I’m on my phone and the second call comes in, it will see my ip phone as IN_USE and then could ring the cell phone so the agent will have calls coming in on multiple devices in those cases.

I get the queue for the hold music but this should be a single extension that has FollowMe enabled and the Queue honors that so the IP phone is always called first and then based on the FollowMe goes out the cell phone if needed. You can still send multiple calls to the IP phone and thus allow them to use Call Waiting/Hold if needed.

8

Thanks Again for the reply!

I should have also stated that the phones in the office are assigned to all of the queues because if the person who is on call is in the office, they prefer to answer on the office phones. Is there a way to set a dial code that would explicitly set multiple call flow controls that were daisy chained?

9

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