We’ve made a couple modifications to our office phone system that we hope are improvements based on our experiences.
- The “support” and “sales” options in the voice prompt menu are now using Asterisk call queues. It will keep you in queue for 5 minutes and then prompt to keep waiting or leave a message. It’s still relatively rare that we see multiple simultaneous calls, but the intent of switching to a call queue is to have callers to wait a bit for one of us to answer instead of being dropped directly to voicemail.
- Time based routing. Our business office for non-critical operations is Pacific time zone daytime business hours. We don’t have someone here answering sales calls 24-hours a day and likely never will. General tech support also isn’t 24-hours since our customer base is pretty self sufficient and doesn’t call for help often, so we can’t justify 24-hour phone staffing at this time. (Although that could change in the future.) So to that end we’ve added time checks to play an “after hours” message and a reminder about the hotline for true emergencies.
- The hotline is unchanged and continues to work as before, although we have updated the intro message. Our hotline system has been extremely successful in practice.
If any issues come up we’ll adjust and reevaluate as needed.