New phone system
I finally convinced the management to scrap our hideously awful brain-dead phone system and replace it with a modern Voice-over-IP system.
We purchased one Redfone foneBRIDGE2-EC device, one Rackform iServ R107 server, twenty-eight Linksys SPA942 phones, two Polycom IP4000 conference phones, five Grandstream HT286 analog adapters, and one Grandstream BT101 phone (to connect to a paging amplifier). We also consolidated our jumbled mismash of phone services (analog lines, a BRI, and a set of DIDs) into one T1 PRI connection.
Unfortunately, the management wouldn’t spring for new Ethernet wiring, so we had to piggy-back off our existing infrastructure, making it infeasible to use Power-over-Ethernet and thus requiring a fleet of local power adapters.
That aside, I have been very pleased with our new equipment. I was able to set up centralized provisioning of the Linksys and Polycom phones (using MySQL, Perl, FTP, and TFTP) without much difficulty. The Grandstream units support provisioning as well, but since they are so simple and we have so few of them, I didn’t bother.
On the software side, we’re using Asterisk (of course). That was the first decision we made, and all of the other components were evaluated based on their Asterisk interoperability. I plan to provide, in a future post, more technical details of how the system is set up. Stay tuned.
I would like to solicit feedback from my audience about two policy questions that came up during the planning and implementation of the system.
First: whether to use an automated attendant (AA) to answer the incoming calls. Under the old system, every call was supposed to be answered by a human. This policy inevitably led to dropped, missed, and/or rushed calls. It also annoyed those of us who don’t like to speak to humans unless it’s necessary; transferring calls based on a dialed extension does not and should not require using a human operator.
After strenuous internal negotiations, we convinced the management to let us set up an AA system to handle calls. Unlike the AA systems used by major corporations, ours is extremely simple: “Thank you for calling Blah. To reach the operator, dial zero. If you know your party’s extension, please dial it now. Otherwise, for blah, dial blah; for blah, dial blah, etc.”
Readers: what do you think? Should an AA be used to ensure that (1) every call is answered promptly, (2) extensions can be reached without involving a human, and (3) the human operator is far less busy and can devote more attention to each call for which the caller actually dials zero? Or, should the policy remain “every call is answered by a human”, even though that’s infeasible, inflexible, and old-fashioned?
Interestingly enough, in our discussions, the response was split neatly along gender lines. The guys voted for the AA, and the women lobbied unsuccessfully for the old system which, theoretically, involves “human contact”.
Second: what do you think of individual paging? When I started at this company, I was shocked to discover that the phone system was set up to allow any user to individually page any other user! Specifically: (1) you’d be sitting there working, (2) your phone would beep and immediately enter into an unsolicited full-duplex (two-way) speaker-phone mode, and (3) the caller would start yammering at you. I was astonished: a company actually thinks that barging in on people’s privacy like this is a good idea? What if you’re busy? What if you’re concentrating on something? What if you’re having a private/confidential conversation? In general: WTF?
Asterisk and the SPA942 phones provide for this behavior (you just set a certain SIP header prior to executing the Dial() application), but I strongly lobbied against it. Unlike with the AA debate, however, my technician and I were the only people opposed to this “feature”. Everyone else either argued in favor of it, or took a “meh, no big deal” position. One person even had the gall to suggest that our opposition stemmed from a lack of desire to assist others (like that has any bearing on ringing-vs.-barging). In general: WTF?
Enough for now…
I think the answer lies entirely with how much money your company is willing to spend on this aspect of customer service. Unreservedly, getting a human on the phone rather than a menu is better customer service, and in my mind always suggests a higher-quality company. But you have to have the call center/desk staff to make this happen. If you don’t, then clearly the AA system is the better way to go.
Christian
22 Feb 08 at 10:46 am
Unreservedly, getting a human on the phone rather than a menu is better customer service, and in my mind always suggests a higher-quality company.
Really? Don’t get me wrong — I hate phone trees from hell just as much as the next guy, but I think that as long as the very first option presented is “To reach an operator at any time, dial zero”, and the remainder of the menu is a simple, one-level structure, you have the best of both worlds. People who want human contact are one easy, quick button press away from it, and those of us who prefer *not* to speak to random humans just to be transferred to an extension or a group aren’t forced to do so.
Kevin
22 Feb 08 at 2:24 pm
No offense, but I’m a “random human” just like you. Obviously I can’t speak for you, but the more contact I have with “random human[s]” the more complete and whole a person I become. The other humans show me how similar I am to them, and at the same time how to differentiate myself from the mass of humanity (i.e. part of my identity is derived from my community [where community is defined to be those with whom I interact]). Not everything the [psych|soci]ologists have to say is crack-pot inanity
Pshaw all you will, but everyone needs human contact (that’s right _needs_), and in my opinion the one place all of us could do with more is over the phone.
To me any level of phone tree spells “cheap” with the font size increasing directly with phone tree level. Even a 0-order tree (AA says, “Re-directing your call to the next available operator”) tells me that the company wasn’t willing to spend the money to hire humans to interact with me on a personal and social level.
So in summary, I agree with Christian… mostly. I think that a reasonable solution would be to have two main numbers, one which dumps you directly to a HumanOperator(tm) during business hours, and a second (back door) which dumps you to a phone tree (with a “press 0 for operator” switch). This is one of the (few) IT related things that my company has done right. I can dial one number to go directly to someone’s desk (in fact a pause then extension in my direct-dial allows me to “skip” even the AA), and I can pass out a second number which heads directly to our receptionists so that we appear to be a company who cares about our customers :-). Perhaps something similar would appease all sides of your situation as well?
jeremy
22 Feb 08 at 11:30 pm
It was decided that calls from 8:00 - 18:00 will be sent directly to a receptionist queue (no recorded messages, just immediate ring-all of everyone in the hunt group) and an AA menu will be used (1) outside of those business hours, (2) on holidays, and (3) whenever the human(s) in the aforementioned queue don’t pick up after three rings.
(Note that behind door #3, the caller has been made to endure 15 seconds of useless ringing during which he could easily have reached his party through an AA menu.)
We are definitely going to have a backdoor as well. In fact, we’re going a step further — we’re a small enough company that we can afford to assign DIDs like candy, bypassing both random humans and AA menus entirely.
Regarding the social contact issue, we’ll have to agree to disagree. While I obviously value interaction with friends and family, I don’t feel a great deal of enlightenment when I speak to a busy, harried receptionist for the five seconds that it takes to ask for a transfer to a given extension. If you do, more power to you.
Kevin
26 Feb 08 at 5:56 pm