3CXPhone Multiple Accounts

[warever]

Essentially, I'm trying to figure out why 3CXPhone doesn't support multiple simultaneous accounts being registered. Here's the scenario:

Client is running essentially two different organizations. Incoming calls go into one of two different queues, based on the DID number called (they're straight SIP trunks). They've got Yealink phones.

Each user has three separate accounts/extensions, each assigned to a button on the phones. If a call comes in on button 1, they know it is a "direct" call, if it comes in on button 3, they know it is a call for organization "A" and if a call comes in on button 4, they know it is a call for organization "B."

Pressing each button for outgoing calls allows using different outbound Caller IDs.

I know the "workaround" using a single account/extension is to simply use the incoming Caller ID to show which queue the call came from, and to dial a prefix (9, 8, etc.) for outgoing calls.

The problem is that each person might be handling one, or the other, or both of the queues. If you dial *62 to log into the queues, if a single account is a member of multiple queues, you'll be logged into ALL of them. No way that I know of to specify from a physical phone. Which is why I've got three separate accounts on different buttons; select the account that belongs to the queue you want to log into and then dial *62 and you'll be logged into THAT queue and not the other.

But 3CXPhone doesn't seem to allow doing this. If I create multiple accounts, you can't have those multiple accounts all registered at the same time. So there's no way to have each account be a member of only one queue but be able to answer calls from both.

I don't remember offhand whether you can log into ONE queue of which you're a member with 3CXPhone or whether - like a physical phone - it logs you into ALL queues associated with that account.

Even if so, that doesn't help with those people who are using physical phones - or more likely, both.

Zoiper (semi-free softphone) DOES seem to allow registering multiple accounts at the same time. Except that the free version doesn't support transfer or hold, and unlike the 3CXPhone, it has no way of knowing the status of other accounts/extensions/queues (even in the paid version, of course).

 

[positron]

I think your best bet is to use one account as the primary extension for receiving all calls, and add multiple additional accounts for placing outbound calls using pre-assigned caller ID for each extension.

If you use the 3CX Phone software (either by itself or in conjunction with a physical phone in CTI mode), you can open the Expanded Presence screen (see http://www.3cx.com/user-manual/expanded-presence/) and can manually log in or out of specific queues by right-clicking the queue member in the queue list. You can prepend the queue name to the caller ID so agents can easily distinguish which queue is presenting the call. Selecting the option to log out or into the queues for the extension will remember which specific queues were active and which were not.

3CX Phone does support multiple accounts, but not simultaneously. You would have to switch between them if you needed to call out using an alternate account. Multiple accounts would work better in conjunction with a physical phone.

 

[Vali_3CX]

Essentially, I'm trying to figure out why 3CXPhone doesn't support multiple simultaneous accounts being registered

Unlike a standard SIP phone (like earlier 3CXPhone6 for Windows) our current softphones provides two additional distinct features:
- CTI
- call management (aka MyPhone)
Now, briefly: in case of simultaneously registered accounts, the user interface will be a nightmare: each PBX may have bridged PBXes, each PBX has user groups, each PBX has queues, each PBX has personal and company phonebooks, each account has different rights to manage all these altogether, various (inter-)call operations has also different rights and so on...

Being involved in the development of the 3CXPhone for MAC, for development/testing purposes I made possible to run multiple instances on the same machine, each with different account: trust, it's a complete nightmare, in 10 seconds you get lost between opened windows, you never know for sure where you are, I'm not kidding :mrgreen:

 

[warever]

I think your best bet is to use one account as the primary extension for receiving all calls, and add multiple additional accounts for placing outbound calls using pre-assigned caller ID for each extension.

If you use the 3CX Phone software (either by itself or in conjunction with a physical phone in CTI mode), you can open the Expanded Presence screen (see http://www.3cx.com/user-manual/expanded-presence/) and can manually log in or out of specific queues by right-clicking the queue member in the queue list.

Not a problem to receive all incoming calls on a single extension/account; as you said, prepending the queue to the caller ID lets them know which queue the call was in.

And not a problem on the physical phones to call out on a different line/extension.

That part isn't possible with the softphone without disconnecting (unregistering) from your "answer" account and switching to a "call out" account, and then back again.

Also, no way to log into or out of the specific queues from the physical phones themselves; it is an all-or-nothing proposition. They'd HAVE to have a computer running the softphone app in order to log into or out of specific queues.

It also means that when they're in the softphone app, if they're on an outgoing call on one of the "outbound" extensions, they'd be unable to answer any of the queue calls because their "answer" extension would be unregistered.

That might not be a huge problem in a large call center where there are lots of people able to answer the calls, but in a smaller scenario like this, if someone is on an outbound call and there aren't other agents to answer the queue calls, people are just going to get dumped into voicemail.

It would be much easier/nicer if extension status was separate from the actual softphone functions. Then the softphone part could do as something like Zoiper and be registered to multiple accounts, while having the separate status screen/app show everyone's extension and queue status.

If there were some API for getting extension status, I'd even WRITE one myself, but that information doesn't seem to be readily available.