One of my favorite things about 3CX is that it is so easy to get creative about how we leverage the great features the product has to offer. It never ceases to amaze me how I can build some fairly complex call handling logic using just a handful of basic features built on each other in succession. A few simple features, when combined, give us a whole new function we hadn’t thought about before!

I think one simple thing I implemented recently may be useful to the rest of the community…

One of the 3CX rollouts I have been working on is for a small insurance company. This company is making use of call queues to handle both sales and claims calls. The overall structure is very simple; calls arrive on the main number to a Digital Receptionist. From the DR, users will select an option (for example “1” for sales) and be routed to an appropriate call queue. Well, that’s easy enough to do with the built-in options.

But after some testing, the customer asked me….

“Mike, there is a 3 hour period of the day where we tend to have an exceptionally high volume of sales calls coming in for new quotes. But, during the same time, we have claims agents that are typically sitting idle. What we would like to do is take 2 of our 5 claims agents and have them also serve in the sales queue during this 3 hour period of the day. Can 3CX do that?”

I had to think about this for a few minutes. By default our Digital Receptionist does not give us the ability to select logic based on this type of specific hour criterion. But, then it hit me….

“Sure can, I replied.”

And here’s how I did it :) ...

I created 2 call queues for sales. Call them "sales" and "sales-expanded". Sales consists of the core sales agents. Sales-expanded is equal to our sales queue plus our 2 extra claims agents. I then created a dummy extension that will never have a phone registered to it. I created 2 inbound, call-forwarding rules on this extension using the new “specific hours” and “outside specific hours” features and set the calls to be forwarded to the sales and sales-expanded queues respectively. I then changed option “1” on the Digital Receptionist to send our sales calls to this dummy extension. So, now, when a sales call arrives through the Digital Receptionist, we are able to apply specific time of day logic and route to an expanded call queue when necessary.

A nifty use of the newly expanded call forwarding rules on a dummy extension I thought. Hope you find this of some use.

Happy 3CXing!!!!

Best,

Mike