Talking with receptionists can give a lot of information about how to configure a Business Central 200 for optimum usage. Something that I found to be quite flexible is the Call Park and Retrieve feature. There are two main reasons to use call parking, also called system hold, instead of local hold.
When a customer calls the office, the receptionist greets them and asks who they’d like to speak to. They then put the customer on local hold, notify the intended recipient, and connect the call to the recipient. This is the traditional method, and as you can see, it’s quite labour-intensive. It requires the recipient to be at their normal telephone extension and available for the call, it requires the receptionist to shepherd the call through various phone numbers, and only the receptionist can connect the call to the recipient. Local hold can only be cancelled by the phone that initiated it!
However, Sutus has simplified this procedure with their implementation of call parking. The receptionist can park the call while they page the recipient. The recipient can then unpark the call from any convenient phone. They recipient can be near any phone in the company, and the receptionist doesn’t need to make the connection. Paging is easy, too: “Accounting, call in stall one, please!”
There’s another common scenario that really makes call park stand out. Imagine that you’re at your desk when you receive a call. Perhaps this call is private, or involves personal information. You don’t want to have this conversation where your colleagues can listen in, so you move to a private conference room. Park the call and find an empty conference room. Unpark the call when you arrive, and have your conversation in peace. Imagine the past – put the call on hold, find an empty conference room, go back to your desk and transfer the call, run to the conference room and take the call. Two trips to the conference room, plus a longer time on hold for the caller – the Business Central helps us with a win-win solution.
In addition, when the receptionist puts people on hold, there’s no way of seeing a list of the callers, which receptionist put them on hold, or their destinations. With the Call Park feature, any Polycom IP phone can display the list of parked calls, with their source number, destination number, and who the call was parked by as well.
Call Parking is a simple feature, to be sure, but it has strong advantages over the way putting calls on hold used to be done. Efficient, convenient, and effective.
- Dave.
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