Jan 31 2022 07:19 PM
Please help, we are fairly new to the Teams application and are trying to implement Teams calling within our organisation. As with any normal PABX system we have one or two reception staff on duty who answer calls as they come in. Often they receive several calls at once and have to put calls on hold while they answer a second or third incoming call. Picture this scenario, the receptionist answers call 1 and a second call comes in. The receptionist puts call 1 on hold and answers call 2 and a third call comes in. The receptionist answers call 3 automatically placing call 2 on hold. The receptionist transfers call 3 to the intended recipient and wants to go back to call 1 but there is no option to select caller 1, once call 3 has been transferred the queue presents call 2 to the receptionist and they are not given any option to select call 1. The call queue management within Teams appears to be strictly on a "First in First out" basis. Is this actually the case and if so WHY? That seems to be to be one of the most basic functions of a phone system, the ability to answer a call of your choosing and direct it accordingly. Or am I missing something and there is some strange MS terminology used to describe this call management function?
Feb 01 2022 11:34 AM
Feb 01 2022 04:15 PM
@samanthaeasterday Thank-you for taking the time to respond to my query but as it turns out I finally figured out what is going, thanks in no part to the GUI design which is terrible and needs changing. Teams seems to default to opening a new window for each call, exactly on top of the last window completely obscuring its view. If you manually drag each window from each call to another part of the screen you can see the other calls and select them as necessary. It would be much more user friendly IMHO to have all concurrent calls in the same window somehow so that one can easily switch from one call to the other.
Feb 01 2022 07:27 PM
Mar 02 2022 10:39 PM
Mar 02 2022 11:19 PM
@NikHut there is also a good solution from Luware calles Nimbus Attendant.
Mar 03 2022 02:35 PM
Mar 04 2022 05:32 AM
Sep 20 2022 11:14 PM
Sep 21 2022 12:23 PM
@AntCraig Yes, receptionists can be juggling multiple calls, but should they?
Which is better: waiting in a call queue and having the receptionist's full attention when it is my turn, or having my conversation with the receptionist be interrupted every time another call comes in?
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that Microsoft's implementation of Auto Attendants and Call Queues is perfect. On the contrary, I think there are some major gaps, such as the lack of an "approximate wait time" feature, and no ability to request a call-back. But I just don't see the benefit of interrupting one call to answer another one and put it directly on hold. To me, that is an obsolete practice, born out of necessity due to a lack of functionality which is now widely available.