Queue then leave voicemail

[GDVillarreal]

Hi,

I have a customer who wants the calls to a queue to only queue for five minutes, then leave a voicemail message. We currently have voicemail pro set up so that the caller gets a menu with either staying on queue or leave a message, but he wants to force the caller to leave a message after five minutes and then have them disconnect.

It would be easy to do if there was a variable that held the amount of time the caller has been queued. But apparently there isn't one. So I went ahead and used a User Variable to do a decision tree (like a 'case' in C) where this variable would get incremented each time the caller gets a queue announcement. This is painstaking since you can't add values, so you have to explicitly assign the next value. Well, all this worked, but just for one caller because a second one would also modify the User Variable and the first one would't get the correct number of queue announcements. Are there any variables that I could use that are independent to each caller?

I also tried doing an overflow group and modified the Queue voicemail flow to make it go directly to Voicemail, so after 5 minutes the overflow would get here and leave the voicemail. But the systems seems to ignore anything programmed for the overflow group, and always returns to the original queue group.

Any other ideas? I guess VBScripting could help me out, or a database connection to store a counter, but it would be silly to buy those licenses just for this Thanks!

 

[Escorthosis]

Just doing this from memory:

On the hunt group enable queing to get the queued and still-queued messages from voicemailPro or Lite.
Enable voicemail on the same huntgroup (and put in a password for easy recording of the message) and set the no-answer time for that huntgroup to 300 sec (5mins but 60 would be better for testing purposes).

Use the H"huntgroupname" feature in a user sourcenumbers form to visualize any new voicemails.

Don't know for sure if this worked in the Argent or IP-Office era or both.

 

[GDVillarreal]

Yes it does work, as you say, if at least one of the stations is ringing; in other words, if it doesn't go to Queueing. If its in queue, then it stays in queue indefinately Or at least, thats what happening for me.

 

[victor5908]

A bit cumbersome,but you can bypass the still q'd,and send
the call to a menu playing a q greeting,then a wav of music.
You may have to insert the music several times depending on the interval of your q message.Then enter the q message again at whatever interval you desire.
You can then set the time out on the menu to 5 Minutes going to a leave mail for whatever mailbox you like.
This ties up a vm port the whole time but gives you total flexibility.
And as the salesman say-"Just sell them more ports

 

[GDVillarreal]

Good idea, except I would lose the actual queue functionality so that as soon as someone is available, they would get a caller sent to them. As far as I'm concerned, you can't put a queue action in a regular callflow.

The real problem is, the IP Office unit can't detect a hangup from net2phone lines, so sometimes callers will hang-up while on a queue and the line would remain connected... We've tried a disjunctor and everything :/