Auto Answer and Reserve Beep

[kevinigvr]

Good Morning All,

We have several departments in our environment that use the Auto Answer for headset feature. We also have screenpops that load via CAD voice contact work flows that will launch necessary windows for the agents upon the Ringing event. However these screens take 5-6 seconds to load and the customer is already on the line with the agent before they are loaded. In an effort to shave off 5-6 seconds of waste we tested out changing the cluster wide setting of the Auto Answer timer from 1 second up to 6 seconds, in hopes it would allow the screens to load before the customer is on the phone with the agent.

This change did achieve what we had hoped, however there is a little annoyance for the agents in the fact that the phone still beeps at 1 second and they think the customer is on the phone. They have to use the visual aspect of looking at their line 1 on the phone itself to know once the customer is on since it will flash orange during the 6 second timer and then go solid green once they are connected with the customer. However, it's been requested to see if there is a way to have the "reserve beep" occur at the 5 or 6 second mark instead of that 1 second mark.

I'm not sure if this is possible, as i haven't found anything on it in the CM or UCCX help files and my initial efforts at searching the forums. Perhaps someone has a better suggestion or alternative.

Thanks in advance.

Kevin

[Sunil_Vs1 · Accepted solution]

Have you made an attempt to find out the source of beep, Headset or CM?

What models of CISCO IP Phone you are using and firmware? Sometime back we found out that all the new firmwares causes beep-beep at the beginning of call which can’t be eliminated when Auto answer is turned in CM.

-Sunil

[kevinigvr]

We were unable to find any settings in Call Manager related to the beep or any timers to extend it. Looked in various sections like the cluster settings under service parameters and through the help files.

It could be a feature of the phone itself then, I hadn't really thought about that aspect yet. The agents in these departments are using the 6921 model cisco ip phones. Looking through the documentation it appears that the only options having to do with the beeps is to have it on or off. So doesn't appear we will be able to control the timing of the beep itself.

I think this will be something that just takes time getting used to. They will hear the beep and their screens will load and they can see when their line 1 light turns green to know when to begin their greeting, or they will just hear the background noise once the customers are on the phone. I think we will give it a test run for these groups next week and see how they adjust to it for several days.

Thanks for your input.

[Jay Schulze]

Hello Kevin,

You are correct there is no place to adjust what is called the 'zip-tone' which are the beeps with auto-answer from callmanager. Just curious though,where did you find an option to turn it on and off? I haven't seen anything on the device settings which would allow this.

[kevinigvr]

Jay,

The only settings I was able to find were under the DN Lines themselves in CM. I'm not sure if it is the same beep or not though.

From CM ---

Device --> Device Settings --> Device Profile --> Select Profile --> Select your DN Line 

On that page are different ring settings for idle/active, etc and some choices have Beep. As i mentioned though, I'm not sure if that is the same beep or not. I couldn't find any other configurable settings though even remotely related. Our agents are getting used to our change we made though. They hear the beep and then they watch their line 1 until it goes solid green as an indicator that the customer is then on the line. Gives the agents time to prepare and their screens time to load. The agents are in Reserved state during this time, so it doesn't add onto their Talk time and actually saves 4-5 seconds off every call.

[Jay Schulze]

Thanks Kevin.

Yeah that setting is actually the incoming call notification. Not exactly the same as the zip tone which is 3 beeps. That's the weird thing about this issue is. There isn't really a setting which will turn off or on the zip tone. Good to hear the agents have adjusted.

J