Ideas for handling temporary relocation of employee?

[stever]

We are an auto dealership with 4 locations. Planning on having one PBX. When covering for vacations, sickness, terminations, employees will temporarily fill in at a different location for anywhere from a day to several weeks. I had planned on handling this by reprovisioning the IP phone at the temporary location with the "fill in" employee's extension. I hadn't thought much about it but that is going to screw up my ring/paging groups unless I modify those too. Our current system is the standard PBX where extensions are not unified with email and cell phones so this has never been a problem. I don't think the new hotdesking feature will do anything for me for this problem...

How have others dealt with this problem?

Steve

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

Hello @stever

As i understand from the description provided, when users change locations you need the user to have the same extension number as the user he/she replaces but change the extension name. You do not want the extension to move with the user. Is that correct?

 

[stever]

cjkoll, I don't think hotdesking will do anything to help here.

YiannisH, the reality is that the "fill in" employee needs to have access to the extension of the person that he is filling in for (because of ring/paging groups) as well as his own extension (for when people want to reach them specifically). The only thing that I can think of is to have a spare phone that is kept just for temporary provisioning in these instances. Alternatively, it sounds like you can log in to the existing phone's browser interface and configure a second extension. That sounds like a lot of work to do though, especially if the fill in is only for a day or two. Cell phone apps would work, but at this point I don't know how well received/used those will be. Worst case (but would work) is to reprovision the phone to the "fill in's" extension and then add the "fill in" employee's extension to the ring/paging groups for the location that they are temporarily at. Lot of room for error with that one.

I was throwing this out on the forum because I got to think that other businesses do this sort of thing and someone has experimented with various options.

Steve

 

[Brian Cross]

How would hotdesking not work in this situation? It is exactly what you are wanting to do by allowing a user login to a particular phone without having to keep provisioning phones...

 

[stever]

Hotdesking could be used but my dilemma is not how to provision the phone for the temporary employee but rather the need to have all the call routings of the employee that they are subbing remain in place. I probably don't understand hotdesking completely, but isn't it designed so that a phone can be used for multiple extensions but only one extension at a time? I really need two extensions during the temporary period.

 

[Brian Cross]

It would be easy to just move the temp extension into a ring group/queue rather then provisioning a phone or whatever.

 

[VoIPTools]

How about leave the phone alone, and just forward the calls intended for the employee temporarily sitting at the other desk to where they are sitting that day. Then they get calls for both employees.

 

[Brian Cross]

How about leave the phone alone, and just forward the calls intended for the employee temporarily sitting at the other desk to where they are sitting that day. Then they get calls for both employees.

Or that lol...

 

[stever]

Thanks for the ideas. None are perfect as the call forwarding in effect takes out the phone that is being forwarded. In car dealerships (retail business) resources (people) are shuffled around to fill in for each other. It seems like the less unified the phone system is, the less headaches there are with temporary shuffling of personnel.

 

[Saqqara]

People may be moved around and may have to use another phone, but surely the phones are in certain departments within your company and these do not changed (calls are routed to departments)

Are you making the issue bigger than it should be as you never had a fully integrated system between the sites

 

[stever]

No saqqara, but thanks for your opinion.