Call Parking

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skycomp_serge

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Hello,

I find 3cx works very good in basically all areas, but one area that it seems to fall down is Call Parking. The Orbits and Shared Parking just seem very complicated for the average phone user to deal with.

It seems that 3cx almost has a very elegant solution but needs one more step.

How basically every other phone system we have worked with works (and I've found very easy to train and users to deal with) is the reception simply transfers a call to a dedicated park extension and then when you do the transfer the system tells you the number to pick it up.

Then Reception doesn't need to have to watch if slots are free or not. We don't have to configure dedicated buttons for every extension etc.

The most common way I see it setup is the parking extension is say 9000 and slots are from 9100 to 9199.

I transfer a call to 9000 (always 9000 I never have to look at what slots are used). The phone system then looks at the first free slot, parks the call there and tells me "Call parked on 9100" or "Call parked on 9101".

Then reception just simply tells the user to pickup 9101 or whatever was read back to them.

Works great for every situation.

The Orbits are simply confusing. I can't figure out a use case that doesn't make this complicated or hard. I've *never* been able to explain it to a user and had them use it effectively. They are always confused. That may be a failure on my training I admin since I can't figure out how it make it easy.

Shared Park is very close. We've used it with some success, but still requires a bunch of extra setup and configuring all reception phones with the slots and reception always has to watch which slots are free and manually pick one. It's close but doesn't work from every phone since every phone since we don't want to reserve basically all the buttons for SP slots. We also don't want to have to configure say an 80 user organization with 80 shared parks and then configure all users with their own shared park.

Would be great if we could just have a shared park extension (like 9000 in my example above) where you can always transfer to say *50 and it just moves the call to the first available slot and then tells you the slot "Call parked on Shared Park 51". Then reception can tell whoever "Parts pickup *51".

Thanks,
Serge.
 
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If extension 200 parked the call, they could announce "Parts, pickup *10200"

https://www.3cx.com/blog/voip-howto/parked-call-desk-phone/

What if extension (being reception and having a high call volume) parked 2 more calls before Parts picked up.

Orbits go in order.

So if a call comes in it's for Parts and they parked it and say parts pickup *10200

Then another call comes in for sales and reception parks it now the sales call is in orbit 2 and the parts call is in orbit 1.

So if sales is on the ball and picks up *10200 before Parts Sales gets the Parts call not the sales call.

Works *OK* with basically no call volume.

In this example (a car dealership) it's not usable really. Not that I could train the average reception or sales person.

Serge.
 
If you had several departments "Picking up" calls in this manner, then reception could be trained t put sales calls into orbit 1, parts into orbit 2, etc. The extension, at the end would not be needed. If it remained consistent, then each department would always dial the same code as the orbit would remain the same. A speed dial key (if available on the set) would suffice.

You might investigate Shared Parking BLFs
 
Hello,

Yes I addressed that scenario as well. This requires lots of setup and maintenance as well as dedicated BLF buttons on phones. It also then doesn't account for say a sales or parts department with a pool of people.

So again their are kludgey work arounds to sort of make Call Parking efficient but you have to pre-define every scenario and do lots of extra configuration.

Then have to try and train staff and have them know when to use which option and hope they remember.

We are using some of these situations right now for clients. I'm just saying I don't have a single client that hasn't commented on the difficulty and lack of user friendliness to achieve the goal.

Most of my clients just end up putting the call on hold. Finding the person then picking up the call and doing a transfer.

So operationally as it stands 3cx's implementation is just not ideal.

I believe I've read all the documentation many times to ensure I am not missing something.

I just hope that 3cx at some point will implement a special Shared Park extension you can transfer a call to and it will then move the call to a free slot and just tell you the slot number and hang up.

That way there is no complicated config. On the other phone systems we support I spend <2 min explaining call parking. With 3cx I prey the clients don't want to use it as I know it's a bunch of setup to make it usable for non-technical people and then have to go through a lot of scenarios with them so they know what to look for.

Serge.
 
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