Different tone or announcement for dual-line.

[joe.borg]

Hi,

Several of our customers are asking whether there's any way for the UC to either generate a different ringback tone or else to play some pre-recorded announcment saying the other person is on the line when a second call comes in on a dual-line DN that's already engaged in a first call. Is this possible and, if so, any pointers on how to go about doing it?

I've thought of using CFB but that would seem to not allow any time for the called party to pickup the second call (e.g. if it's more important than the first) and I'm not sure CFB would even trigger in this case....

[Marcos Hernandez]

I love these type of requests, they get my old brain working. If you are comfortable with CLI and the native CUE GUI, you can do this:

1) Change your user's DN to be single DN, not dual.

2) Enable Transfer to Voicemail on the system using CCA. Default xfer to voicemail prefix is "6".

3) For your user, configure call forward busy to 6+ a dummy user extension (270 in this example), i.e. 6270

4) Create a Park Slot using CCA or CLI (number 701, for example)

5) Configure one of your user's phone buttons to monitor that park slot (BLF via "m" operator in the button command under ephone). That means that when a call is parked on that slot, the user will know it since the corresponding button will light up.

6) Log into the CUE GUI and add a "phone-less" user. Give it an extension (270 in this example, as mentioned above). Make sure you create a mailbox for it  and that call forward is not enabled (click on image to expand):

7) Make the Mailbox an announcement only mailbox:

8) For this mailbox, configure it and then record the audio that you want your callers to hear: "Thanks for holding, please press zero to talk to one of our representatives"

9) Configure the Caller Input on the mailbox to transfer to the Park slot when callers press "0":

What will happen is this:

1) Someone will call your user's extension.

2) If he/she is on the phone, and because he/she has a single line dn, call forward busy will kick in and send the call to the announcement-only mailbox (via the direct transfer to voicemail target of your call forward busy statement).

3) The caller will hear the prompt you recorded in that announcement-only mailbox and will press zero, at which point, he will be transferred to the park slot.

4) Because your user is monitoring the park slot, the button will light up indicating someone is waiting. He only has to press the button to pick up that call, or let it linger there if the current call is more important. The person waiting will hear MoH.

Let me know how it goes.

Marcos

[joe.borg]

Wow. Thanks Marcos!

I'll definately give this a shot. I'm actually considerably more comfortable with CLI so no worries about how to do this in CCA. Just a few questions:

1. Will the customers lose any functionality going to single line? I thought stuff such as three party conferences needed dual-line...

2. Am I correct in understanding that this would effectively require three ephone-dns per user? The actual dn, the dn for the phone-less user with the announcement mailbox, and the park slot? My only concern here is the dn limitations on the UC. Still, worth a shot if there's capacity at any rate...

ta,

Joe

[Marcos Hernandez]

To answer your questions:

1. Yes. You can experiment with dual line DN's and the huntstop/huntstop channel command, so you don't lose features.

2. No. The announcement-only voicemail does not take a DN. So it would be two per user, or less, if you decide to share park slots. Please consider using dedicated park slots, that way you don't cause issues with calls being parked all over the place.

Another caveat is that the monitored parked call just gives you BLF, which means you don't know who is waiting (no caller id, nothing).

Good luck!

Marcos

[Marcos Hernandez]

Another thing you may want to try is call forward busy directly to the park slot (no transfer to voicemail) and then you modify you MoH to play the audio you want callers to hear. Since you can only have so many active sessions against CUE, this gets you around issues that you would run into, if the site had heavy call traffic.

Marcos