Queue Play Announcement missing

[rlg]

Hi,

Why there's still no Play Announcement option for a queue Destination if no answer ?



We really miss it.
We have to workaround with Digital Receptionists, which is painful, and makes configuration hard to maintain, especially with lots of queues (almost 400 on some systems !).

Thank you very much !

 

[AbdullaR_3CX]

Hello @rlg

Regarding your inquiry, currently, the “Play Announcement” option for a Queue destination on no-answer is not available in the PBX.

As a workaround, you have a few options:

1. Forward to another system extension – You can configure the queue’s “No Answer” destination to send the call to another extension that plays the prompt you want (Your Workaround)
2. Use a voicemail box – Set up an extension with a voicemail greeting containing your announcement, and configure the queue’s “No Answer” destination to that voicemail box. The call will play the VM greeting and then allow the caller to leave a message. (Note: this will transfer the caller to voicemail, which may or may not be what you want.)
3. Call Flow Designer (CFD) – If you need more flexibility, you could build a CFD project to handle the call flow and play the announcements.
   For more details, you may refer to our Call Flow Designer Manual and our CFD Components documentation.

For now, these are the available methods, and we do not have information on whether the PBX will support a native “Play Announcement on No Answer” feature in future updates.

 

[rlg]

Hello @AbdullaR_3CX

Many thanks for your reply, really appreciated

We sometimes need to play a message simply telling agents are not available right now.
Or to play a message before forwarding to another destination etc...

So the Play Announcement option is really really useful.
To be fair, it's rather hard to understand why it's available in all 4 Destinations types, but the Destination if no answer one.
Does not really makes sense at a first sight, even sounds like a simple omission from the dev team.

We then do use workarounds to address this issue, but as I said in my first post, they are painful, hard to read / to maintain.
The Play Annoucement would of course be much more convenient.

Thank you again !

 

[DimitrisL_3CX]

For a call to reach the destination if no answer it means that:

1) There is no agent available at this moment to take a call and the caller waits in the Queue
and the max timeout of the queue has been reached.

2) All agents are logged out of the queue when in office hours.

For the first scenario, the music on hold for the queue will play, so you can change the MOH of the Queue to play the prompt you want. You can change this in the Options tab of the Queue.

For the second scenario, if you have "End call" selected, a prompt will play to inform that there are no available agents and then it will end the call.
If you have selected to forward the call to another destination, it will immediately forward the call to that destination. The caller will not know that the agents are not logged in the queue.

 

[rlg]

Hello @DimitrisL_3CX

Thank you for your reply !

We have queues with various Maximum queue wait time, and a global proper MOH coming from a recording studio.
This MOH may be shorter than the Maximum queue wait time, so tuning the MOH to be equal to the Maximum queue wait time, inserting a prompt at the end... is a worst workaround than using Digital Receptionists...

We do have a dummy extension in every queue, so that we never face case 2, so that we never face the "no agents available" prompt, so that customer / caller experience is at its best.

We simply need to play a gentle message to the caller, after he has waited several minutes in the queue.

Thank you again !