Voice Announced Transfer

[distcomp]

Does anyone know a work around that would allow the Attendant on a Definity R6 to voice announce a transferred call to a station.

They would like all calls are answered by the Attendant, placed on hold, announced to the end user, and then transferred.

As it stands now, the Attendant has to press "start", ring the phone of the end user, wait for them to answer and then "release" the transfer. The Attendant is complaining that this takes much too long for the volume of calls she has to answer.

My original thought was to program an intercom, or page button on the operator station and turn it into a two stage process; i.e. place incoming call on hold, intercom or page end user, then transfer.

I am not sure if this would actually work, but it is the only thing I can think of.

Any better ideas???

Scott
sklemm@distcomp.com

 

[Bobg1]

Why in the heck do they want each call announced?
Your thoughts about intercom or page probably won't help
as this still leaves extra load on the attendant.
What you might want to do is look at the numbers under
list attd measurment and see what they look like. If they
show that she is pretty heavily loaded you would then have something to show the boss's and hopefully get them to recind the idea of announcing all calls.

 

[distcomp]

I could not agree with you more, but the customer is coming from annother (much smaller) phone system and this "how they did it".

I have already told them this is not how the big boys do it and the system simply may not be capable of performing this function.

I am just looking for options...

 

[kcbell]

Remember distcomp, we are paid to do what we are asked to do. It is not always inline with our technical judgement!

What you are asked to do is exactly backward of what things are going. Companies will go from attendant with live person to auto attendant. Your company is going one step further “backward”; the attendant has to announce the call before transfer. I feel sorry for the attendant.

One function that I can think of that you need to investigate is “whisper paging” to the station. This will allow the attendant to announce an incoming call before transferring the call. I haven’t used it before. So I cannot tell for sure this is what you can use.

Hope this help! Good luck!

 

[Bobg1]

kcbell
I believe the whisper page feature is to be able to announce a call to someone who is currently on another call.
Don't think it will help with what distcomp is up against.

 

[Phonia]

Okay, a small rant here. It seems like this is the day for customers wanting to have their $50,000 PBXs to work like their $10,000 key systems... All of the wonderful things the Definity can do and we're reduced to wondering if there can be some kind of announcement to replace the live body. Or if you'd rather, all of the ways the Definity can speed call processing and we're insisting on slowing down the whole game. Geez, dare I hope that if someone whose call is announced refuses the calls, you've at least got voicemail to take the call rather than making the receptionist take a manual message?

I'm afraid that the only solutions I could offer are not hardware- or software-related, but behavior-driven. As I see it you have four options (with only the first one being realistic in today's business world), ranging from the most reasonable to the most ridiculous:

Option 1 -- the receptionist announces calls only when she is not overloaded by inbound calls. Internal customer perception rating: medium due to inconsistency in call screening -- although, granted, you may find that a lot of users simply don't care and will let calls roll to vmail if they can't take the call. External customer perception rating: medium-high depending on wait for transfer and what happens if the person they're calling isn't available (are they transferred to vmail automatically or do they have to go back to the long-suffering receptionist to be ASKED what they want to do when their only real option is voicemail?).

Option 2 -- add another receptionist. Call load is then shared between the attendants. Upside: all those calls are announced. Downside: You're paying for someone else to transfer and announce calls. Seems like misallocation of resources to me.

Option 3 -- the receptionist leaves callers on hold until she has time to announce the caller. Internal customer perception rating: high. External customer perception rating: low due to potentially long wait for transfer to their party and what happens if the person they're calling isn't available.


Option 4 -- upgrade your PBX to the most recent software load and get voice-announce software which I believe has the capability to not only understand who the customer is looking for, but also can record an intercept announcement during transfer. Expensive (probably much more so than option 3) and maybe difficult to engineer, but again, you've got all of those calls being announced...

*sigh*

good luck...
Phonia
Telecom Goddess