General question about parking calls

[resd]

I am replacing a 10 year old Cisco system that is dying very quickly. On the current system when a call comes in the receptionist just pushes park and the system shows a number say 821. Then she will page the person over the PA system and say you have a call on 821. The person goes to a phone dials 821 and answers the call. On 3cx the normal way to handle this put the call on hold then press *01 thru 9 to park the calls. They like the Cisco SPA 504G but I do not see a way to setup soft keys to automate parking calls. Example button one programmed to *01, button two *02, etc. Does anyone do anything similar to this or have a model of phone that they would highly recommend that could do this?

 

[efounco]

There are a couple of ways of doing this, but this is the solution I found best:

1. Purchase a SPA500S sidecar for the phone and setup a few of the BLF keys for shared parking (it's an option in the BLF section).
2. Re-provision the phone after making changes.
3. Create virtual extensions for each shared parking (i.e. 500, 501, 502, etc.)
4. Setup these extensions to forwards all calls to the EXTERNAL numbers (SP0, SP1, SP2, etc.). Be sure to use caps for 'SP' or it will not work.
5. When your operator parks a call using the BLF keys, it will put them into shared parking. The light changes color when a call is parked. The operator then announce the parking lot number over the intercom/page.
6. When a user wants to pick up the call, they simply dial the virtual extensions number (500#, 501#, 502#, etc.) and it will transfer them into the corresponding parking lot.

Make sense?

The disadvantage of this method is that you only have 10 lots . Also, you will not be able to park calls with MyPhone by right clicking on the incoming call and selecting park. Instead, you will have to drag and drop the calls onto the virtual extensions.

Let's hope the developers of 3CX add an option to park calls in shared parking and regular parking in their next revision of MyPhone.

 

[--mark--]

We have the setup you talk about, same phones. I provision the last two buttons (of the 4 to the right of the display) on each phone to SP0 and SP1 (within the provisioning section of the 3CX system) and label these Line1 and Line2. When someone takes a call, they press either of the two buttons and hang up, this turns that light RED and parks the call with muzak on hold.

Whoever took the call now either shouts to whomever that a call is waiting for them (we're open plan!) or for workers elsewhere on site (same LAN) they telephone the person as usual, tell them a call is on line 1 or 2 and hang up. Anyone on the system can now pick up the call simply by pressing the red light button. It means we have only two parking locations but the simplicity means that calls are picked up quickly so it's rare we ever see both in operation.

Advantages include clearly seeing someone is on hold (red light) which quickly gets noticed if a call doesn't get taken.

It's not very different to the idea previous other than you use the buttons already on the phone. I like the idea of virtual extensions to collect calls, we are experimenting with some different IP wireless phones without BLF buttons and this makes a nice way of picking up a call on them.

By the way, you can in theory program three of the four buttons to function as hold/parking slots, or perhaps two and use the third for something else. Unfortunately the way the provisioning works, it only allows you to provision 2 buttons. I believe this is something to do with being able to take and handle two calls on the phone at once but I personally struggle handing one call let alone two! The only way I can see to fix this is to play with the complete template for the phone, each time I've tried I've ended up breaking the autoprovisioning. Please do jump in with working templates anyone!