what is the best agent phone setup ?

[francis.labelle]

Base on your own experience wht is the best agent phone setup ?

- Two DN, the first has ICD extension and the second for the personnel call ?

- Two DN, the first for personnel call and the second with an ICD extension?

- only one DN ?

Thanks !!

[thisisshanky]

I have had situations where we used all 3.

With scenario 1, you may have the following challenges.

a. If second is personal extension, you may have issues with MWI, because by default system only lights the MWI lamp when primary line (line 1) has voice mail. You can change this behaviour by changing the service paramaeter MWI lamp policy -> from "Prime Line-Light and Prompt" to "Light and Prompt"

b. When a user goes off hook, it by default selects line 1 (which is ICD extension in your case). Many supervisors like to know if an agent is on a outgoing call or not when they are supposed to be actively answering calls. You can force this situation by making ICD line as first line and their personal extension as second line. Set a CSS for ICD line to call out (PSTN access), while the personal extension may be set with a CSS to call only internal extensions or call nothing.

With scenario 2,

a. Since ICD extension is line number 2, and if phone agents are used, its possible they may miss when they are already on line 1 on a personal call, because it only flashes on the screen. I would prefer using 7941/61s in this situation, where the buttons are lighted. So when a call comes in on ICD line (line2) it flashes which is a better visual indicator.

b. You wont have problems with MWI, nor with placing outbound calls like in Scenario 1. But the disadvantage is that if an agent is on a personal call, Supervisors have no way to monitor the status of the agent.

Scenario 3:

Single DN

There is nothing wrong with using this scenario. Make sure you have call waiting enabled. In 3.3 there is a per line setting you can enable. In 4.x leave the Busy trigger to 2 or more.

I would prefer scenario 1 or 3.

HTH

Sankar

PS: please remember to rate posts!

[abhijit75]

Hello,

We use situation 1 and it works well. Situation 2 can be tricky for the reasons stated by Sankar.

We are about to move a sales division over to our Cisco phones and I have found in testing that with only 1 line, calls do not go to voicemail if an agent is talking and using CTIOS. We are using CTIOS 6.0. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a work around?

Also the current system the sales center uses, an older Avaya, has the ability to track outbound calls as a different state so when computing available time it includes outbound talking time as available along with the ready time. This might seem confusing but it helps the reps make outbound calls and not lose their place in the queue for an incoming sales call.

This is a problem for us right now in working around this situation. I dont think we add agent states in ICM or change the way longest available agent is tracked?