Exiting employee coverage options

[mmcalli]

I am looking for a consistant way to handle calls to employees that have left the company with the minimum amount of administration and something that is easily "undone" when a new individual takes over that extension. What I was thinking of was changing the coverage path to point to a special vector controlled VDN for processing.
What I have:
Definity G3csi V8.2
with vectoring
Intuity Audix version 5

What I'd like to have happen:
Callers to an extension receive a message that says
"Thank you for calling XYY Corporation, the person you are attempting to contact is no longer employed by the company. To connect to the covering extension press 1 now."
It then rings at the covering extension and proceeds to the covering extensions voice-mail if unanswered. If they press anything except 1 it hangs up after playing a messsage "Thank you for calling".

I know how to write a vector to do this on an extension by extension basis but am hoping that someone has a way that doesn't require a seperate vector for each extension with a bunch of modifications to the Audix routing to look through each time. Thanks for any suggestions and sharing your experience.

 

[lopes1211]

Create your vector and VDN. Create a coverage path pointing to the new VDN. Assign that coverage path to all stations that you wish to receive the message. -CL

 

[mikeydidit]

It seems that not everyone that is leaving is not going to be in the same department, so you will need differant places for the extensions to cover to. The simplest thing I can think of is to put a covering extension on their Intuity subriber form. Then you can have a message they have left, press 0 for help. This is an easy to redirect your calls where you need them to go. If you find any mistakes, please consider that they are there for a purpose. And everyone needs a purpose.
Hope this helps, Mikey.

 

[vaoldschl]

I'm with Mikey, I assign a covering ext. in Intuity, forward immediate to VM and change the greeting to say "You have reached X department. This extension is no longer in use, press 0 now...) I normally let that sit for three months and set a reminder for myself to delete the mailbox and forwarding if no one has taken over the ext. in that time.

If you wanted to standardize it and your turnover rate was low you could create a mailbox with the recorded greeting and then just put the former employee's extension in as secondary. This would only work if you had one ext. using this at a time, however.

 

[sjforcum]

I do the above, but I change the subscriber to an Auto Attendant so that the caller cannot leave messages in this voice mailbox (even though the announcement should have gotten that point across, it still happens).

I don't think there is a way to centrally do this unless you have the coverage route to the operator and let them re-direct the call.

 

[mmcalli]

Thanks for all your suggestions. Since I might have 20-30 or more stations that I'm doing this with I didn't want to do a seperate VDN and vector for each one.
I wound up doing as Mikey first suggested but I also changed the mailbox type like sjforcum suggests but instead of AutoAttendant, I make it a bulletin-board. From the Audix manual:

"Bulletin Board can be used to provide a daily news message, a help service message, directions, or other type of message useful to a large group of people.....
Another common use is to replace a former employee’s voice mailbox with a bulletin board to inform callers of that person’s replacement, and/or new number..... Bulletin Boards are simply Voice Mailboxes with only half the normal Call Answer function: they can greet the caller, but cannot record a message from the caller. Recording information messages is identical to recording Personal Greetings."

This will do the trick, It just requires recording individual messages on each departed employees box instead of one announcement in the vector and sometimes messages require re-recording several times to get it right.

If there was a vector command that could grab the last 4 digits (the extension) of the called number I could accomplish what was I looking to do by:
Creating 1 VDN and vector, creating a cov path that covers to the VDN. Record the 1 system announcement
"Thank you for calling XYY Corporation, the person you are attempting to contact is no longer employed by the company. To connect to the covering extension press 0 now."
Then right after it played the message it would go to the messaging split for that extracted extension where it would hit the bulletin board but with a blank message so that when they press '0' they are providing the command to go to the mailbox's covering extension. Easy!
Anyway thanks again!!

 

[vaoldschl]

I think I have a pretty decent solution for this one. Your Intuity can transfer calls for 'non-subscribers' to a default location defined in the system parameters. Say that's your switchboard. When a call for a non-subscriber comes to Intuity and gets transferred it plays the name announcement of the extension to which it is transferring. If that name announcement was "You have reached XYY, this extension is no longer in use, we are transferring your call" then all you have to do is delete the mailbox of the user who is leaving and continue forwarding it to the Intuity. Would create a lot of admin log errors but would simplify the process.

The part where this gets tricky and time consuming to install is if you are using a default '0' out option as your attendant than you would have to do the following: If the attendant doesn't have an extension then assign one. Assign an x-ported station with a coverage path that goes to the attendant only. Change each of your subscribers so that the covering extension matches that of the attendant. Assign the system-wide covering extension as the x-ported station.

 

[mmcalli]

Maxg,
That's, definatly thinking outside the box, or boxes, in this case. For some reason, the powers that be (before I was around), decided that we are not to have an attendant. Besides, unless I'm not interepting your solution properly, I cannot redirect various no-longer-used extensions to different covering individuals with coverage to their mailbox's. Thanks though for sharing your insights, it likely will be a solution that someone is looking for. Cheers,

 

[mattk24]

I don't know if Audix has a Transfer mailbox like Octel, but if it did you could change the cov path to auto vm which has a Transfer mailbox. In the Transfer mailbox form you enter the extension you want the call to go to after the message/greeting is played.