Holiday Schedule Routing/Prompts

[ziggylink]

We have several inbound rules for different departments. We also set the schedule to use different digital receptionists (prompts and routes) between normal business hours and after business hours (the "Office Hours" system feature). That part is working great!

We are now looking to implement automated Holiday schedules. I like the fact that you can have different audio files per holiday. However, this flexibility is slightly misleading, as all calls are just funneled to a single system HOL Digital Receptionist. That doesn't really work for us (referencing the various inbound rules mentioned earlier). I understand that the holiday schedule can also simply put the system into "out of office" mode, though there is no indication to the caller why the office is closed during the day. Ideally, we want to have an announcement message (for each holiday if possible) tacked to the front of any digital receptionist prompt during a holiday schedule.

Is this doable? If not, would that be something other people might want?

Thank you!

 

[Saqqara]

Does this help you

There are a few different scenarios you can set regarding Holidays and office hours.

When you set a Holiday the PBX will automatically go to Out of office hours during the set time.
Under Trunks and Inbound rules there is an option called "Play holiday prompt when it's a global holiday". If that is set then during Holidays the call will be forwarded to the HOL IVR and the message set there will be heard by the caller. If there is a message set under Settings / Timezone & Office Hour / configure Holidays then that message will be heard instead and not the HOL IVR message but the call will still be handled by the HOL IVR. This way you can set different messages for different holidays without having to change them through the IVR before each holiday.

All holidays are actioned by one HOL IVR, so you can not play the holiday message before your normal IVR

One way you could do it, leave the holiday message blank and record different messages for the IVR (include the holiday message plus ivr options) which would need changing before the each holidays. On the input of the correct number forward to the correct voicemail

 

[VoIPTools]

This can get very messy very quickly depending on your needs. For example if parts of your company are closed for the holiday while other parts are open, that pretty much eliminates using the built-in Holiday feature of 3CX doesn't it?

I imagine you could funnel all your inbound calls through a CFD application (or multiple CFDs) and have the CFD choose where to route calls based on the holiday schedule and other criteria you specify. Also, it seems to me that we could automatically add the holiday message to the front of an existing IVR prompt, and then revert back to the standard message after the holiday. We have built various prompt schedulers before.