Archive for March, 2010

Interoffice Calling

Published March 25, 2010 Feature Highlights , New Leave a Comment
Tags: , , , , ,

Calling other office locations can be a real pain. Obviously, long distance charges can really add up, and tying up phone lines can cause missed calls. Using the BC200 to route interoffice calls over the internet keeps your telephone lines open and saves money too.

So, how does this work? All you’ll need are two or more offices with an Internet connection and a BC200 at each location. Setting it up is pretty easy – the BC200′s wizard walks you through it.

Our screenshot below shows that our home office is San Francisco. We’re directly connected to the BC200s in Vancouver, Chicago, and Boston, and we have a local telephone line available too. Via Boston, we can also reach Toronto and New York.

This allows for flexibility in call routing too. With this example, we could allow anyone from any office to place a call to the 604 or 778 area codes, regardless of their physical location. Conversely, a customer in San Francisco can call our 778 number and be seamlessly forwarded to our corporate main offices in Toronto, all with no long distance charges. And the San Francisco office doesn’t even need to be open!

Imagine this scenario: Customer Jane, in Boston, wants to talk to the Sutus sales team, but it’s 7:30pm, and her local office is closed. In the past, she’d have to do several steps.

  1. find out where other Sutus offices are located
  2. figure out the time difference
  3. find their phone numbers, and
  4. pay for the long distance call.

With Interoffice Calling and an optimized call flow, however, she just has one step:

  1. call her local office.

Their BC200 takes care of the rest.
Her call will be forwarded to Vancouver where they are still open and able to take care of her. No research, time calculations or phone charges needed.

Customers saving their money is great, but we at the office like saving too. Especially the finance department! Imagine that I’m in New York, and I need to call our importer in Toronto. I could call long distance, but that’s going to become expensive. Instead, I can use the Toronto phone line. My BC200 routes my call to Toronto, where their BC200 sends it out to the phone network. Success!

Send us a line if you have any questions – our new website has all our contact details. If you’re already a reseller, click here. If you’re an end user who is interested in the Business Central solution, click here.

That’s it for this week. Talk to you soon!

-Dave.

Managing Call Flows

Published March 3, 2010 Feature Highlights Leave a Comment

Hi everyone,
What we have today is a way to show all the call flows for the company on one screen. It’s pretty useful if you need to see where calls to your company are going, if you transfer people from department to department, or even for troubleshooting.

Here’s a screenshot with some common examples:

  • Win is a pretty important guy. When someone calls his number, the BC200 will ring every phone in the company. If he doesn’t pick up, it will then try him on his cell.
  • The Development group doesn’t take calls, so their incoming calls just terminate at their voicemail box.
  • Sales and Marketing has two members, and they’re interchangeable in terms of clients. A call for them will ring all the phones in the group, and then go to their voicemail.
  • Stephanie‘s calls mostly come from overseas, from people who are in very different time zones, so we’ve set her number to go straight to voicemail. She’ll return the calls when she comes to work.
  • Andrew Watson is the only member of the Development group, but he doesn’t want to stop working for every call the Development group gets. He’ll get calls for his extension, and if he doesn’t answer, it gets sent to the Development voicemail.
  • My Group and Test One go straight to voicemail, because they’re for testing new configurations and for temporary uses.
  • Gabe North has three destinations in his call flow. The BC200 will ring his phone, and then expand to the Reception phones, and then go to voicemail. This lets people contact him in both of the parts of the office where he works.
  • The Reception group rings all the Reception phones, and then goes to the Auto-Attendant.

Now, using the “Distinctive Ringtones” and “Send Office Voicemail Notifications to your Cell Phone” entries from a few posts ago, we can customize these flows even more, all in a simple fashion. I hope this gives you some ideas about how to improve your call flow efficiently.
-Dave.