Low-Cost Call-Queuing Alternatives
Call Queuing is a feature that lets callers wait in line until one of your live attendants is free to take another call. Phone systems that have a caller queue will be able to hold onto additional callers in case you don't have enough personnel to handle all the calls.If you only have as many people working your phones as you have phone lines, then you will never need a queue. But if you have more phone lines that allow more callers to get through without a busy signal, then it is important to be able to hold those overflow callers in some way.
Systems with call queing are usually more extensive. If price is an issue, there are tricks you can use with the low-cost VoicePro phone system.
The Voice Pro does not have a caller queue feature. But there are a couple of tricks that you can use as described below...
Play Announcements: Some phone systems, such as the Voice Pro, can play announcements to callers to keep them occupied and interested. But with this method you need to give the caller options after the announcement, such as to wait longer while the system tries ringing to an attendant again, or leave a message for a callback.
Music-On-hold: Some phone systems will play music-on-hold while it is ringing. The Voice Pro has that feature but it is not a true caller queue. Here is a solution when using the Voice Pro. Let's say you have four incoming phone lines but only three attendants. You can program the VP408 or VP412 to ring four extensions simultaneously for all calls and set the number of rings to something really high, say 50 rings. The 4th caller will hear the music-on-hold while waiting for up to 50 rings. When one of your three attendants becomes free to answer that 4th caller, they can pick up that other ringing extension by dialing *50 on their own extension.
If price is an issue you may want to consider these crude tricks with the Voice Pro. But if you need a phone system with a true call queuing feature, try a Google search for "Call queuing".
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