Roaming users.

[silicondarktide]

Hello we have IPO 9.0 with voicemail pro.
We are setting up auto attendant that will transfer to each dept. with 1-9 tones. HR - 1 Accounts payable 2.. etc..

We are coming from a system where our employees all picked up the phone (whoever was faster), paged overhead for who the call was for, and the intrended user picked up the call which was then on hold.
Since the page was overhead everyone heard who it was for. Now we will have an auto attendant that transfers to the intended dept automaticaly.

The only problem I see is...
Our employees walk around the building a lot and are used to answering calls intended for them on other peoples phones.
For example: Chuck is in Daves office. He hears overhead "Chuck line 1" from whoever picked up the line first and picks up line 1.

With the auto attendant I see users missing a lot of calls because they were in someone else's office.

My question is mainly, can I setup some sort of call flow that rings an extension, and if no one picks up it then park and pages, then if no one picks that up it goes to voicemail?

What do you guys do for roamers?

Maybe setup DTMF breakout to park and page or something?

 

[NLPeterK]

I have never used Park&Page to be honest but after reading the documentation (Administering VM Pro, section 4.8.10) you have a few options:

1 If your attendant options transfer to one user, do an assisted transfer and have the 'no answer' option flow in to the park&page. Configure accordingly (prompts, paging group etc). Busy could go somewhere else or also to P&P.

2 If your attendant options transfer to a hunt group, more problematic. Ofcourse it can be done (ring all users first, overflow to group containing virtual user with call forward to shortcode, shortcode points to VM module containing park&page etc). However, look at this from the caller's point of view: this is going to take forever! Not really caller friendly.

3 Park and Page every call.

4 Lead every call into groups by department. Educate users to set DND when they leave their desk (or set no answer to like 10 seconds) and let all calls overflow to a group with all users. Have answering user do the park&page. This way you have advantages from both old and new. If user is @ desk, he'll get his own calls and nobody else will be bothered. If not, call will go into 'old mode'.

4 Give your roamers a cordless phone <- I like this one best!

 

[NLPeterK]

Did you manage to get it to work somehow?

 

[silicondarktide]

We got analog cordless phones for the people who roam the most. We internally twined them to their desktop phones.