Telephone Move Policy

[chicagophoneman]

I have been given the task to come up with a policy for telephone moves. Upper Management has decided that there will be no more moving of extension numbers from location to location. I was wondering if anyone had a written policy that I might look at for inspiration on coming up with our own policy.

 

[SF0751]

We don't have a written policy, but our unwritten policy is that numbers are only moved within departments, and are never moved from one department to another or from one location to another.

Department to department moves are denied because there might be customers who have the phone number, and they will want/need the department, not the individual.

Location to location moved are denied because the DID number should come into that physical location, and not be rerouted over the WAN. This is important in case we have a WAN outage and one of our locations is in stand-alone mode.

We have never made an exception to this; not even for our Senior VP's.

Susan
"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." - Oscar Wilde, An Ideal husband, 1893

 

[phoneguy55]

My feeling is that when I assign you a DID you have it until you die or quit. Which ever comes first. If you move from office A in NY to office B in LA well that's a different story. I'll give you a local number at the site your at but forward your old number to the new for X months.

I've heard of people being forced to changed DID's becuase they swapped desks but I would never do that.

 

[sjforcum]

In this day and age with flattened, virtual nationwide PBXs, I can't for the life of me see why this would be an issue other than perhaps if you've got limited WAN bandwidth....

I could see if you leave the company that you can't take the number with you, but if you're still in the company, keeping the DID number allows you to transition your customers MUCH more professionally than one day having someone new answer the phone and say "Bob left the department"....

 

[SF0751]

Reasons for NOT moving the DID number with the individual:

Bob moves from Accounting to Marketing. If I allow him to take his DID with him, future conversations go like this: "Hi Bob. Can you check on purchase order 123456 to see if we're up-to-date on the invoicing?" "Well, Joe, I'm no longer in the Accounting department, so I don't have access to the AP system. Let me transfer you to the new person. Their phone number is 123-456-7890." "What was that number again? I'm going to have to update all of our contact sheets."

I think that each organization will be different in how they approach this. For me, DID numbers are associated with a position or a department, not an individual.

Susan
"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." - Oscar Wilde, An Ideal husband, 1893

 

[dialtonebone]

As a company with more sales people than processing and admin staff, we keep the DID's the same no matter what.

For out of state employees who have IP phones in there houses, we give them the option of a toll free but they still have there local DID. It's just easier. Our company is attempting to appear seamless, and this helps.

 

[Frith]

In my client's site, the user retains the DID as they move throughout the building or get promoted or whatever. The number is known not only by co-workers but also their personal contacts (wife, girlfriend, daycare, etc.)
There was a time we ran out of DIDs and had to start assigning extensions; these days, we offer to replace the extension with a DID and leave a referring greeting on their old voicemail mailbox for several weeks. I never like forwarding calls; that simply discourages callers from learning the new telephone number.

Doug Frith
Unity Telecom