Thanks everyone for all the replies.
We made the choice to use the contact center instead of the huntgroups for the reporting capabilities. Also I think the phone will keep ringing if someone's not at their desk because the system doesn't know who's at their desk.
Our clients complain when the phone keeps ringing and we don't pickup the phone. They think we don't answer the phone. They also complain if they get a greeting or are put in a waiting list because they pay for the phonecall (yes I know, but we really got such complaints). The waiting time can be more than 10 minutes.
Our problem with the waiting list is that we only have 6 lines that have to be shared between the sales, support (3/4 people for support), fax & private lines. If people get queued up all lines get used.
In our previous pbx we could assign lines to a some kine of huntgroup. If we assigned 2 lines, the third one that tried to call that phone number got a busy signal. The disadvantage of this was that everytime this had to change we had to go into the settings and couldn't be adapted dynamically to the needs of the moment.
Things we considered:
- Record a busy-tone and play the fake busytone as message. Problem: we setup the callcenter to distribute for 45 secs so they first get a dialing tone and after 45 secs a busytone... not usable.
- Work with a callback system: if they don't get an answer after 45 secs, we ask them to leave their name & number and we call them back. I think this would be the most client-friendly approach but the boss is afraid that in busy periods we won't have the time to call the people back and in a lesser amount for the costs of the callback.
Thanks for the help.
Youri
