Hi there,

One of my pet peeves when phoning local shops is to have them interrupt our conversation “because someone else is calling.” It’s frustrating for the other customer, too. Does “Hi thanksforcalling canyouholdplease?” sound familiar? It is good that the company is getting so much interest, but there’s a more professional way of dealing with the calls.

Enter the Call Queues function of the Business Central 200. It provides a better experience for your customers, because their calls are answered and processed in an efficient manner. It’s better for your employees too, as they don’t have to interrupt their existing conversations to put people on hold, and they can help callers in the order they are received.

When you’re on the phone, Call Queues will answer any incoming calls, play your message, and put them on hold until you’re done with your original caller. It will then connect the person on hold and let you take care of business. It’s just like having a checkout line in a store – first come, first served.

Call Queue has been added as another call destination, like auto attendants, voicemail boxes, or telephones. Here’s how to set it up. Log in to your BC200 using your Administrator password , and select the ‘Call Routing’ menu. At the top there’s a tab for ‘Call Queues, which is where we’ll be working today.

Select ‘Create’ to make a new queue. The ‘General’ tab on the right side is where we can set various parameters, the ‘Queue Menu’ assigns actions to keys that the callers can press while waiting, and the ‘Users’ tab shows which workspaces use the queue. The ‘Clips’ menu allows you to engage your customers with advertising messages, play hold music, or simply tell them their place in line. Save your changes, and you’re set up!

As a suggestion, here’s a setup that we’re using here for testing. When a customer calls our Sales number, the Auto Attendant answers them and plays our welcome message. The caller has the option to press ’0′ to leave a message for the Sales workspace, but if they don’t, they are automatically put into the call queue for Sales. As the workers in Sales finish their calls and hang up, the BC200 connects the next caller in the line to them. If nobody answers within the timeout limit, (two minutes in this case) they are automatically sent to the Sales voicemail.

This is in beta testing, and will be available in the next update.

Yours, patiently in the queue,

Dave.

It’s been a while, but I have some good news. SUTUS has recently released their newest software version, and I’m pleased to tell you about part of it – configurable Auto Attendants. (Auto Attendants are sometimes called IVRs – Interactive Voice Response.) I’ve been involved with testing this, and this will definitely make it easier for your customers to reach the departments they want.

There are four differences. Now, we can:

• make a different Auto Attendant greeting for each department,
• have one greeting for open hours and one for closed,
• map single phone buttons to direct callers to voicemail boxes, workspaces, or workgroups
• make simple phone trees.

Let’s go under the hood. Log in to your BC200 with your administrator password. From the list on the left, select Call Routing. From there, select the Auto Attendants tab, and you’re in. You can see which auto-attendants are assigned, who is using them, and, by clicking on one of them, you can see what keys are mapped to which actions.

I was involved with setting this up and testing it. It’s a pretty good demonstration of how your BC200 can route customers’ calls more efficiently.

Here’s an example: At our local car dealership, they had a full-time receptionist to answer and connect their phone calls. Customers complained of lengthy hold times, and the receptionist was under stress trying to keep up with the volume of calls! A quick survey showed that only a few calls were for specific people, as most of the calls were people looking to speak with someone in either the sales or the parts departments. They decided to filter these calls out with an auto attendant before the BC200 rings a Reception phone, and let the receptionist deal with the calls for specific people.

Their receptionist recorded an auto attendant greeting describing the options for callers. They then assigned the keys as follows:

’1′ key connects to the Sales Dept. workspace

’2′ key connects to the Parts Dept. workspace

’3′ key connects to the Reception workspace

Now the callers can bypass the receptionist, thus freeing them up to speak to people who need guidance. My Managing Call Flows blog article has some tips that might be helpful when setting this up.

They also created a second auto attendant to use when the dealership was closed, which was set up on the Reception Availability tab. This allowed them to have another message and to add the option 9 to reach off-hours support. Before, all off-hours callers had to leave messages with Reception, and she would transcribe and email those messages to their intended recipients when she arrived in the morning. How tedious! Now, using the same key assignments as above, callers can leave a voicemail with a specific department. They also added ’9′, and they assigned it to call (123) 456-7890, which is their after-hours emergency contact number. Calls that come to the Reception workspace are sent to the appropriate auto attendant depending on the time of day.

Before multiple auto attendants, callers were subject to lengthy hold times even before they spoke to the receptionist, the receptionist was stressed out and unable to keep up with the number of calls, and customers were unhappy. By setting multiple auto attendants, customers can reach the people they want more efficiently, and the receptionist can concentrate on calls for specific people, rather than those for general departments.

This is included in the version 1.7.2 release of the Business Central software. If you’d like more information, just search for ‘Attendant’ in Business Central Manager’s Help.

-Dave.