Team Voicemail, Feature Admin from IVR, Periodic Annoucements, Queue Breakout to Dedicated Queue Voicemail

Hello,
This is a message about some things I would hope that the developers would pick up on…
If somebody can tell me any of this can be done without custom coding i’ll eat my hat. I’m a little disappointed that something as sophisticated as FreePBX has missed out what I would consider to be a standard expectancy within English call management platforms.

“Team Voicemail” (Not a feature but what i’m calling it) does not exist

I looked for a solution that would allow for what is essentially blast voicemail with the option for the first person who picked up the message to delete it to prevent a customer getting repeated callbacks about the same message. There isn’t an option. The next best thing is to set up a virtual extension with a voicemailbox that members of the team have to dial into. They should be able to dial into their own voicemail and at the same time be able to access a group voicemail folder. It would also be helpful if there wa sa voicemail ringback option to call a list of people when a voicemail is left.

Feature Admin from IVR (Specifically the ability to escape a feature code when selected from the IVR to go back to the IVR is non existent)

This is useful for example, customer ivr has an option for staff facilities on option 9, this leads to a child ivr which says “press 1 to access your voicemail” that directs to group voicemail on *98 (Dial Voicemail Feature). Staff members logs in to their voicemail with their ext and pin number, they listen to their messages but they have to hang up to get the IVR again. Say staff member listens to the voicemail and then needs to type an ext in to call the person who left the vm…

Also my partially sighted mother has a dedicated ivr menu that she’s routed straight to when she phones, one of the options is a speaking clock which grately helps her (she has the external telephone number to my system on speed dial). So Press 1 for speaking clock, press 2 to speak to me. When she goes into the speaking clock she can’t escape it. If you can’t escape it, what’s the point in making it available on the IVR?

Periodic Announcements does not do proper periodic annoucements.

I want the music to stop every so often when someone is in a queue, play a set of messages randomly, and then start playing music again. Do I really have to record mix the music and the announcements myself on a massive long track? Things like “your call is important to us, sorry it is taking us a little longer than expected to get to you”. "Did you know most general questions can be answered online at “website”?

Queue Escape to Voicemail on demand by the customer does not exist

I have 25 queues for 25 different skillsets. Each skillset has its own dedicated vm box. The customer can only breakout of the queue to a dedicated ivr at a time I specify and not at any time the customer wants. I want the customer to have the option to queue indefinitely or be able to leave a vm after a given amount of time (if they had the option straight away everyone would simply leave a vm and we’d be constantly calling people back and running up a bill). So, in practice, after say, 5 minutes in the queue, i don’t just want to transfer them out the queue to vm automatically, i want to give them the option whether they want to remain or go to vm.

Because each queue has it’s own dedicated vmbox, am I really to have to set up 25 ivrs saying “press 1 to go to voicemail” because each queue needs routing to a different vmbox at the customer request? There should be a drop down box in each queue that says “press [box to enter number] to exit to [feature/queue/extension/voicemailbox] (you choose) at any time during time in the queue” and then the ability to announce that they can do this after a given amount of time.
Any thoughts?
Kind Regards,
Beanie.

I don’t have time this evening to respond to all of your wish list, but check out these two commercial modules VM Notify http://www.schmoozecom.com/vm-notify.php and VQ Plus: http://schmoozecom.com/vqplus.php

Your last 2 options as not something FreePBX can control. Those would be hard coded options in app_queue in Asterisk and option 4 does not exist.