Introduction
This is a UC320 use case study based on actual successful customer deployment. All private and some general details (customer name, employee names, location, passwords, account name, and device MAC addresses) are masked with ficititious subsitutions. Minor changes on the config are also made to better illustrate the call flow. The config, however, is a working one and can be used as a template for similar deployment.
Key Attributes
PBX mode with four FXO lines. Live receptoinist during business hours. Other office workers can pick up incoming calls when the receptionist is not available. Support of one remote worker through hairpinning.
Fictitious Company Name & Profile:
Bob Insurance, Inc. locates in Los Angeles, California with a 7 digit dial plan. The office is mostly one open space of about 800 square feet where everybody can see each other.
The company has 5 active employees and 1 intern in the office plus a telecommuter who work from home.
The company has 5 FXO analog lines with one of the lines dedicated to a seldom used FAX machine. Four of the FXO lines are in one rotary group.
Call Flow Design:
All phones in the office will “ring” (one audibly and the rest via LED flash) simultaneously when a call come in. Any phone, except the intern’s, can pick up the incoming call, greet the caller, and then transfer to the desire agent. However the call is normally picked up by the designated receptionist Ron. Rachel is designated as the backup receptionist. Other workers will answer incoming call only when neither one is available.
Everybody in the office has the same phone (525G) because the customer strongly believes it will simplify personnel training on the phone system. We also equip Ron and Rachel with a side car to facilitate transfer. The side car is programmed in such a way that the press of one single button will blind transfer an answered incoming call to either the agent’s desk or voicemail.
This particular customer does not feel the need of having a separate night mode. Incoming calls will be answered by the AA after the 15 second timeout with nobody answering the phone regardless of whether the office is open or not. The customer recorded AA greeting verbally instucts caller on which extension to call for each office worker. The caller can leave a message after a second time out ringing the agent’s desk. Alternatively the AA greeting can be changed to announce voicemail extension (adding the prefix 7 to the primary extension) instead. This way the caller will go directly to the agent's voicemail.
Each office worker has a private voicemail box. There is no group voicemail box.
Additional Highlights:
The side car is programmed with the primary extension and voicemail extension of each office agent on the left and right side respectively. The receptionist can do a blind transfer by the push of a single button. The receptionist can also visually confirm via BLF the transfer is successful. This customer is very pleased with this programming arrangement.
If the caller wants to speak to the agent who works at home, the receptionist will blind transfer to the agent’s home number (pre-programmed on the side car). Hairpinning takes place (using two analog lines) during the duration of the call.
This customer initially complained about having to dial the access code “9” when calling outside. That is because they used to have a key system. But they quickly got used to it especially after learning to use the dial history. The actual deployment uses 2 digit internal dialing plan that might be friendly for some customers. I changed it to 3 digits here because this might be a better default for templating.
Each phone has a primary and addtional extension. Only the additional extension is used in the company hunt group for incoming calls. This way each user can program their phone to ring audibly for primary extension and just blink on additional extension. This is a very useful arrangement because the workers (other than the receptionist) can ignore their phone unless it audible rings or flash for a long time with nobody picking it up. It also reduce unnecessary office noise tremendously. The audible ring is a user control setting which can change back and forth through the phone's menu interface.
Instead of using a hunt group, shared extension can be used instead with almost identical effect. I prefer the hunt group choice for this deployment. The LED for all other phones will go off as soon as one person answers. Another constraint is that share extension can only handle two simultaneous calls.
Firmware version and config file name:
2.0.6(10) BobInsurance2011a.cfg
