I have a challange I need some out of the box thinking on.
I have a doctor’s office that we use a freepbx switch with. It is working well however we need a way to be able to have the secritary select the correct call route for the correct doctor who is on call for after hours. The system is supposed to answer with an IVR and then transfer to one of 5 doctors based on what a user selects.
This can be done easily in the admin panel however I dont want to give the access to the panel in case they mess something up. The way I have thought about doing the selection is either using the user portal and changing the follow-me settings. However that is clunky and requires the person making the changes to know the doctors numbers/and or pager info.
The other way I thought of was to use the call flow toggle. That would work well because I can assign it to an option code that they dial and pre-program all the numbers however I believe it will only work with 2 doctors, not 5.
Anyone have any suggestions?
Did you try time groups and time conditions or don’t they have a schedule?
I don’t know how they’re used (never needed) but suspect you’ll figure it out if it’s possible…
Seems you could probably create a queue as a destination, then show the receptionist how to manually log extensions in and out of the queue, so they could only keep one doctor in the queue at any one time… depending on the hardware you may be able to map some BLF’s to make this easy for the receptionist… You of course could use iSymphony for logging them in and out as well if you have that licensed.
No, they have a total of 5 doctors. It could be more, or less though. Only 1 doctor is on call on any given night but they have no exact schedule. It is decided who is on call that day. So, their needs to be a flexible way of haveing an admin person set who (or which virtual extension) will be getting the calls agter it hits their nighttime IVR.
Someone suggested we use a queue and just setup each dorctor with a virtual extension and then have an admin person log the corresponding extension into the queue that will be on call for that day. I am going to try this out tomorrow. Thoughts?
See if this serves:
Create one virtual extension for each Doctor pointing to their cell/pager.
Create one more virtual extension to receive off hours calls.
Have the receptionist point that last extension to one of the Doctors’ extension every day (using ARI)…
Would that be workable?
I give you an A for effort. That was actually the first thing that I thought of you to try. However if failed because the system does not allow for nested follow me extensions. Something to do with the # on the end of the external phone. number.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be cryptic (wakeup time my neck of the woods). If what I suggested could work then I’ll try and “demonstrate”.
For all the Doctors’ numbers, you will need a static dial string that looks like: SIP/outtrunk/dialnumber,allowringtime,calloptions
(I’m using SIP so I won’t claim I know how others look) so if your outtrunk is “bluebell” and you’re dialling 123456789 and you wish it to keep ringing (until it throws you to voicemail) my suggested dialstring would look like:
SIP/bluebell/123456789/900/tx (the options perhaps that would allow the doctor to record the conversation or transfer it to a consultee by hitting *1 or # set whichever way you like)
Listen, I’m just trying to help you do what you want.
This is for the five “virtual” speed dials (if you wish).
Now the last extension should be straightforward.
Wow, thanks so much for your help. I am going to try to deal with this again later today and see how things work. I have 2 things to try now.
the only issue with what you had mentioned above. If it does work, is that different doctors want to be notified in different ways (doctors are a pain in the ass). some doctors want to have multiple phone numbers to transfer to. Some doctors only like to use pagers and have the voice mail system provide the notification. Other doctors want a cell phone to ring and leave a voicemail mailbox.bottom line I need the flexibility of having the ability to have any doctors dial string to be able to program what each doctor wants, preferably from the user facing GUI in freepbx.
I think that if the call Queue configuration using the a CD works, it might be the easiest way to do this. I will focus on that first. however if your method does work it could be just as easy, Maybe easier. The benefit of this is that it’s set in the user panel which is very easy for them. I’ll let you know what happens.