Hi all,

I've successfully setup this system on our older Axxess system. What I mean by 'system' is the Star app that transfers our after hours callers to an on-call agent if they select that option from our night greeting.
So, I applied the same steps to our 5000 system. Here are the steps I followed:
Create a Star App: 2510
1. Create 1 Call Routing Announcement for each day of the week 2511-2517 Mon-Sun (the on-call agent will change every day)
2. Create 7 Phantoms, and 7 Extension IDs, 291-297
3. In the Star App I setup #3-9 for each day of the week and call the corresponding CRA. Each CRA Times out to the corresponding phantom under the Digit Translation 'Timeout' option.

The reason I setup 7 of these is because a not-so-technical user can program the forwarding for the entire week and be done with it.

Here is one question: When a caller presses the number to transfer to an on-call agent, the auto-attendant says 'Welcome to the Inter-tel voice processing system' - or something like that. How can I turn that off? I would like to just go directly to the forwarding without hearing any message from inter-tel.

Also, since I've assigned an extension ID to each phantom, should both internal and external callers, dial the number of the phantom and be forwarded to the external number?

Is there any reason why remote programming the phantoms would not work? (and by 'remote' I mean a user at the location of the phone system picking up their handset and using the remote programming feature, by pressing the special key, then 359, etc . . .)

I may have more questions later - thanks!

Well, the greeting you are hearing is played from the Call Routing Apps you are using. Remove the day and nite greetings from each one and you will be good there.

You can dial the extension of yer phantoms as long as the 1st digit of the phantoms ext number is represented as "Transfer to Collected Extension" in the CRA you are trying to dial out of.

You can absolutely use the Remote Programming feature on phantoms.

Thanks Super,

I didn't realize that the Day and Night greetings were automatically added for CRAs by default. Now that I've got that greeting out of the way, what about the other helpful one that says, 'transferring call to extension #291' and so on. How can I remove that greeting.

Thanks,
Carrie

Go to the Extension ID or mailbox of the phantom the CRA is transferring to and remove the 'Auto Attendant Transfer Prompt".

Voice Processor\Devices\Extension ID's\Specific Ext ID (291).

Well, now that we are finally operational, I'd like to ask a few questions about this procedure, just to see if I understand it correctly (I thought I asked these already, but I guess the post didn't go through - please forgive me if these questions ended up in a different post.)

1. It looks like STAR apps can only call other apps. They can't call extensions, or phantoms, and I don't see a way for a STAR such as this to timeout to an extension or phantom when the criteria is met. Is that correct?

So, again, for this setup, I had to have 7 other CRAs to forward to the right person, and the only way to do that was to Timeout the CRA under Digit Translation to the phantom device. I'm guessing that since I removed all of the Day and Night greetings for these 7 CRAs, that the system does not wait very long to find that the caller has not pressed a number - since there are no greetings, there is no instruction to do so. Is that correct?

Well, I may have more questions after I get the answer to these. I just documented this procedure for our company records and it's quite extensive. When I face the inevitable question 'Is all of this really necessary' I'd like to respond with the explanation.


Thanks,
Carrie

1. Correct. STAR stands for Scheduled Time-Based Application Router. They only route to other apps.

CRA's timeout after the entire Day or Night greeting script has played from top down. If there is no greeting script, the timeout is immediate. Make sure all your music on hold settings are set to ring, because if left to default callers will sometimes will hear a burst of music on hold.

Super,

Thank you for confirming that there was no shorter (or easier) way. Hey - Job Security, right?
I will change those music settings, too. Thanks again!

Carrie