Always On
Today’s business telephone systems enable nearly constant communication. Calls, emails, faxes and instant messages can reach you wherever you are; in the home office, at a branch office, or on the road. Along with this awesome power comes the responsibility of having to manage those communications. There may be times you want those calls routed to voice mail. There may be other times you want to screen your calls or send them all to your assistant.
Presence Management to the Rescue
Presence Management (PM) allows you to tell your telephone system where you are and how you want all of these communications handled. Your personal status is broadcast to all of your Unified Communications systems and utilized by them to direct your communications. So anyone trying to reach you will be routed where you want them to go based on your current situation.
Suppose a customer calls your business to place an order at the last minute. The employee who usually handles orders is away on vacation, but, through the presence management system, she receives the call. She then uses her smartphone to dial in to the corporate system and, through presence management, is able to locate another employee who can place the order. However, there is a question about the order. The second employee checks your PM status and sees you are in a meeting so he uses instant messaging (IM) to contact you. You are able to quickly answer the question over IM, so the sale can be completed.
Doing the Two-Step
Presence Management is a two step process. First you need to be able to set your personal status to Available, Out-of-the-Office, etc. This should be possible from whatever device you are using – office phone, PC, smartphone or tablet. Second, you need to be able to create flexible call routing rules based on that status information. “If I am out of the office, send all calls to my mobile phone. If I don’t answer there, send the caller back to my office voice mail.”
Point of View
The ViewPoint call management app from Vertical Communications provides just that functionality. And, since ViewPoint Mobile is available in both an Android and IOS version, you can use it on your mobile phone or tablet as well as at your desk.
When you are logged in to ViewPoint, you see the following screen:
Notice a few things about this view; In the lower right, you can see my current personal status (Available). By selecting the drop-down list, I can change my status (current options are Available, Do Not Disturb, In a Meeting, Out of the Office and On Vacation). Also, in the Extension list I can see the presence status of others on the system.
Routing Lists
That’s all great as far as it goes. It’s good to be able to see the status of others on the system at a glance. That helps us choose the best way to contact someone. Remember in our example, this is what let Employee #2 know to contact you via IM. But now we want to let the phone system make use of that information. To do that, we will use Call Routing Lists.
Here, I have selected the ‘Configuration’ tab on the left and ‘Routing Lists’ from the Configuration Menu. The window shows my existing routing lists, named Standard and Out Of Office. As you can see by the description, the Out Of Office routing list routes the call to my cell phone, then back to my voice mail if I don’t take the call there. Here is what that rule looks like:
If we click on the ‘If not answered’ tab, we see the following options:
So you can see there is a lot of flexibility in how calls are handled by this routing list. For example, if I do not answer the call on my mobile phone, I could have it go to a co-worker’s mobile phone, or go to my assistant’s voice mail.
A Demo
So let’s set one up from scratch. We are going to create a routing list for when I am on vacation. We want incoming calls to go directly to voice mail and play the ‘On Vacation’ greeting which I have recorded earlier. I simply right-click in the routing list area and select “New Routing List’. Here I have created the new list and named it ‘On Vacation’.
Now we click on ‘New Action’ and are presented with the following list:
When we select ‘Play Greeting, the list of available greetings is displayed. We select ‘On Vacation’ and save the Routing List.
Tying Routing Lists to Personal Status
Voila! We have a new Routing List. Now we want to make this Routing List active whenever we select the ‘On Vacation’ personal status. We go back to the Configuration menu and select ‘Personal Statuses’.
Select the ‘on Vacation’ Status and open it for editing.
Here we select the ‘On Vacation’ Routing List and save it and we are done! Now, whenever I select the Personal status of ‘On Vacation’, This routing list will be used. My On Vacation voice mail greeting will play and the caller can leave a message.
Feel the Power
I hope this helps you see the power of ViewPoint and of Presence Management and personal Routing Lists. All of these things put the power of control in your hands. They allow you to manage the ‘always available’ nature of today’s communications and direct calls in a way that works for you. When combined with ViewPoint mobile, you have control whether you are on a desk phone, your smartphone or tablet.
Would Presence Management help you control your calls? Are you using the PM functionality of your business telephone system? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Recent Comments