Friday 28 October 2011

IP Office SoftConsole - The secret to handling hundreds of calls



If you have a very busy reception function the IP Office Softconsole makes it easy to manage large numbers of calls.

You can quickly locate and transfer calls to people within your organisation which keeps callers happy.

If you need to put callers on hold you can do so easily or park their call in a number of slots until you locate the person they need.

And if calls start to build up you can easily monitor queues.

And don’t worry that callers will get lost in the system as the Softconsole will alert you to anyone who has been waiting so that those who have been waiting the longest receive attention first.

Let’s jump straight into the most important part of this program – handling calls.....



Call Handling


When a call comes in you will see it straight away in the Call Information pane. The Call details will have a red border to alert you and shows some information about the caller.

Answer the call by pressing Enter on your keyboard or clicking on the Answer Call Button.

The next action you will take depends on what you want to do with the caller. If you have dealt with the enquiry you can just hang up. If the caller wants to speak to someone in the organisation you will need to transfer the call. The way you deal with this depends on whether you will be announcing the caller (supervised transfer) or just putting the call straight through (unsupervised transfer).


 

Transferring Calls

Unsupervised Transfer

Just click on the transfer button and enter the extension number of the person you want to transfer the call to. Alternatively you can just drag and drop the call either onto a contact in the Directory Panel or onto an extension in the Busy Lamp Field panel

Supervised Transfer

If you need to announce the caller you will need to make a separate call and then join the two together. Simply initiate a new call by finding the contact in the Directory Search panel or entering their extension number and clicking on the Make Call button   

If they agree to take the external call just click on the Transfer Complete button


If the person is not available to take the call you can always put the caller through to voicemail. Just click on Actions > Voicemail Transfer and enter the extension number of the person they are trying to reach.


 

Holding Calls


Sometimes you will need to put a caller on hold whilst you deal with another task or locate the person they are looking to talk to. There are a number of easy ways you can do this.

You can click on the Hold Current Call button or drag the current call into the Held Calls pane immediately below the Call Information pane.

You can take the call off hold by dragging the call back into the Call Information pane or clicking on the Answer Incoming \ Waiting Call button. Alternatively you can transfer the held call to an internal user by clicking on the Transfer button or drag it onto an extension on the Busy Lamp Field Group.


Parking Calls

Parking Calls is very similar to Holding Calls but the key difference is that other people can handle parked calls whereas only the person that put the held call on hold can retrieve it. This would be more useful where more than one person in the organisation is running the SoftConsole software and handling incoming calls.


The IP Office SoftConsole makes it very easy to handle a large number of calls and quickly route them to the person in the organisation that the caller needs to speak to. And most importantly it means that callers get a great impression of your organisation.

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