Custom hunt group ring mode?

[mastr5]

Hi,

We recently migrated to IP Office from Asterisk/Trixbox. The hunt group ring modes (Rotary, Collective Call Waiting, etc.) don't by default work quite how we want so we want to explore whether there's any way to go beyond the default options.

Background:
We have a small call center (12 seats) and our call center agents make outbound calls (via a dialer) and take inbound calls at the same time. The dialer works such that agents "log in" by calling it; when a recipient answers, the dialer bridges the call to the agent. In other words, the agent has an active call to the dialer essentially all day, even when they're not actually on a call with another party.

The problem:
We would like to use the Rotary or LongestWaiting ring modes, but they will only send a call to an agent if they're not already on a call. However, everyone is always on a call (because they're logged into the dialer) regardless of whether they're actually on the phone with someone. This means we have to either use the Collective Call Waiting ring mode, or leave one or more agents off the dialer to handle inbound calls (and actively manage how many agents that is based on how busy our inbound queues are).

What we'd like to do:
Our ideal solution would be to somehow use the Rotary or LongestWaiting ring modes without the restriction that it will only send a call to someone who's not already on the phone. Perhaps another way to achieve the same thing would be to somehow say "if a call is between a call center agent and the dialer, don't count it as an active call". I'm not sure which is the more useful way to look at it.

Sorry for the length of this post; I'm new to IP Office and wanted to try to make sure I explained clearly what we're hoping to accomplish.

Any feedback on whether this is possible and/or how to approach it would be greatly appreciated.

[markgallagher]

Off the top of my head you have no option with the group modes. However, Group buttons would allow the agents to see when there are incoming calls waiting to be answered and to answer one.

[mastr5]

Hi Mark - thanks for the reply, much appreciated. Would Group buttons imply still using Collective Call Waiting, with the difference that the phone would indicate when a call is available rather than everyone's phone ringing?

The reason we'd prefer to use Rotary or LongestWaiting is that we would like inbound calls to be distributed more-or-less evenly/fairly among call center agents (as opposed to whomever hits the button the quickest).

[markgallagher]

The Group button flashing (or whatever it does since it depends on the phone model) replaces the call waiting indication so yes, it would work with non-collective groups.

I'm not sure how effective longest waiting would be with your agents effectively being on a call (either in or out) all the time (still trying to understand that part).

Pressing the Group button would answer the longest waiting group call. By default it would put the agent's current call to the dialer automatically on hold - would that cause a problem? If so you may need to turn off the system's Auto Hold setting and the agent would have to make a new call to the dialer when they finish a group call.

[mastr5]

Yeah, it seems this is a somewhat unusual way for dialers to work.

LongestWaiting caught my eye because I thought it would give an inbound call to whomever received an inbound call least recently. On a second glance, it might not be helpful after all, if the "wait" encompasses all calls (inbound and outbound).

It would not be a problem to put the dialer on hold in order to take the incoming call (they would need to put the first call on hold in order to take the second one anyway), so I'll look into using a Group button. Thanks again for the lead.

[havel3]

For the "Longest Wait group" you can set per user if the longest wait time applies for all calls or only for external incoming calls. User>Telephony>Supervisor Settings
What happpens if you have three appearance buttons per user and set the "Call Waiting" option active?
I always thought that if the user is on a call a seccond call would trigger the second call appearancce button? Pressing the alerting button will force the active call to go on Hold and connect the ringing call.
If that works then enable the "Reserve Last CA" in the multiline options per user.
I never ever use more then two Appearance buttons as it is not desired her in europe but it may solve your problem.

[mastr5]

For the "Longest Wait group" you can set per user if the longest wait time applies for all calls or only for external incoming calls. User>Telephony>Supervisor Settings
What happpens if you have three appearance buttons per user and set the "Call Waiting" option active?
I always thought that if the user is on a call a seccond call would trigger the second call appearancce button? Pressing the alerting button will force the active call to go on Hold and connect the ringing call.
If that works then enable the "Reserve Last CA" in the multiline options per user.
I never ever use more then two Appearance buttons as it is not desired her in europe but it may solve your problem.

If I understand correctly, that's essentially what we're doing now. We have three appearance buttons, with "Reserve Last CA" enabled.

That's working well for us, with the one catch that we want to use Rotary (or possibly LongestWaiting) as the ring mode rather than Collective Call Waiting. We can't use Rotary or LongestWaiting currently because they won't send a call to someone if that person is already on a call, but our call center agents are technically always "on a call", because they log in to our dialer by calling it and staying on the line with it.

[msuite]

I know a lot of dialers can be configured to call the agent, which would put the outbound dialing in queue with the inbound calls, assuming that the dialer does answer verification for the agent (press 1 if you are real, in case of queue messages answering). So look into the configuration of your dialer and see if it can do that.

The other option would be to use ACCS, which has its own dialer. I haven't gotten into ACCS before so I don't have any further details other than feature descriptions I have read for the product, which seems to indicate it does have outbound dialing capabilities.