I have a great suggestion for freepbx, you know how you press ## to transfer a call, well it be nice if you could press ** to place a call on hold, what it does is place the person who pressed ## on mute, and starts the MOH. And to remove the call from hold press * to turn off MOH and unmute your phone, this would be a great feature for those who use Follow-me, or remote agents.
I tend to use Follow-me and sometimes I could be driving and don’t want to miss the call, I would like to be able to pick up and ask them to hold and place them on MOH, instead of them hear me yell at someone who I have cut off as I try to pull over to the side of the road.
sounds to me like you would be doing a better service to yourself and the other drivers on the road if you chose not to answer your phone in such cases. That’s what voicemail and CID is for. I’m sure the callers will understand.
Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx
jacknab: I dont think that asterisk supports such an option at this point. But it sounds like a good idea - maybe you should suggest it to THEM. You may also what to think about using call parking (and as Philliple pointed out - car parking :-} )
I thought about call parking and played with it, didn’t work. - the agent could park the call using ## to transfer but then it hung up there phone so then they would need to call a phone number to pick the call back up or wait till it timed out and sent the call back to them.
Since I posted this suggestion we have come across another situation, when running a small call center that called the agents via there land-line phone. Some agent are needing to place a caller on hold and call a manager or local office someplace for information. So looks like to solve these small bumps is to use a softphone. (reason I didnt want to use a softphone, is because it’s installed on the agents personal computer and they could use it anytime of the day to make calls to who ever)
I am not a developer but I’m talking to one of my friends who knows php, and like to see if there is a way to make a small webpage “pop up window even” that would let the agent login/logout via the web, and since freepbx is still connected to the phone call when it uses follow me, the web page “logged in with the agents extention” could have buttons for hold / transfer / acw that they could click and it tells freepbx what to do just like it would via a sip phone or keypad commands.