Handling holidays?

[sbussinger]

How are you expecting people to handle holidays? I see where you can set the daily hours you're open, but what about being closed for New Years Day? Do you have to temporarily edit the hours you're open to account for the holidays or is there some additional support for this?

Thanks!

 

[Anonymous]

as you noticed the office hrs are "global" so yep you have to configure this for public holidays when they come up. Would be nice to have it integrated with for example outlook so it know when the holidays are. But not every country and or religion has the same holidays......

I understand that will not be the way to go, so what do you suggest? Personally I would like to have a register function. I believe this is in the wish list.

You can ask yourself the question: Being reached by phone is that a organisation responsibility or a called party responsibility.

If you want to do it on organisation level (holidays etc) that is "simpler" than by called party.

I guess to solve it we better not take holidays (just kidding).

 

[sbussinger]

Actually I've never really seen this handled well in any of the phone systems I've worked with (admittedly that's only a few). Mostly we've just had to modify the workday schedule on the fly to omit holidays and then fix the schedules again afterwards.

What would be nice is if you could enter a list of closed dates that overrode the weekly schedule. You'd still have to review it every year to make sure it's correct (since some holidays float around) but it'd be easier to having to change the weekly schedule and then change it back.

How do other systems handle this?

 

[Anonymous]

Callmanager (CISCO) allows for follow me type scenarios. What you do is as you do with computers, you log on to your phone.

Logging on to your phone allows you to set different scenarios:
- avaialble ---> phone will ring
- bussy --> phone will prompt but end user can decied what to do with the call
- away --> diverts all calls direct to the voice mail.

The end of the day it depends what you try to achieve, eg during holidays divert to voice mail or other number etc.

Most of the time you have to put the responsibility back to the user, to configure/set the phone in the correct status.

Henk.