Call waiting for ring groups / find me follow me

[Baze]

Hey everyone,

We've had a few requests for this and I thought I would see if anyone else out there has figured something out.  Essentially looking for the ability to disable "call waiting" for a user with multiple devices.  As an example, they have a desk phone and a cell phone set to ring desk first, and then 10 second delay to the cell phone.  Now, if you are currently on a call (on desk phone), what happens is despite you ignoring the call or otherwise, it will fail to your cell phone.  Bit of a distraction for the user to have the cell phone ringing at the same time.  Anyone seen this?  Any workarounds? Thanks in advance!

[Darren Schreiber]

There is not a workaround to this. So, interesting thought though.

Currently we have some options on when to continue ringing to the next device. Right now if the call is unanswered or rejected we also move onto the next device.

SOME phones (and I stress some! not all) can be programmed to return a specific code (such as CALL_REJECTED) when the user pushes the button on the phone itself. If they do that, we'd know they specifically chose not to answer it (versus it just ringing and they weren't there)

We could potentially make it configurable so if the user did this, we'd skip ringing the remaining phones.

I will file a feature request for this, it's a good idea and annoys me too actually haha.

[Baze]

Hey Darren,

Thanks so much for the reply!  We gave the phone thing some thought, but had decided it would be better to head down the path of figuring out how to add a feature to the backend instead since each phone was different.  Glad to hear you guys might be interested in doing this as well. :)  Couple of thoughts we had while talking about this that might help FWIW (if I manage to find the feature request on jira I'll try to comment there as well)

1. Find me Follow me UI - would probably want something called "Don't Nag me" or similar (that is what we've started referring to it as, anyways).
2. Initially we thought we would just simply check BLF state, and if user was busy, just go to the end of the callflow.  Then we realized that the minute we did that, someone would say "but I want to be able to see the person calling so that I can get off the phone faster or switch over.  I just don't want it to ring my desk phone AND then my cell, AND then my soft phone"
3. So then we figured maybe we check BLF state, and if user is busy, we send to the device they are currently talking on (if that information is available).  If we get a no_answer, then we check if no-nag is on and go to the end of the callflow (usually VM) if so.  
4. if option 3 is possible, this eliminates the whole issue of "what if i want my phones to ring at the same time instead of sequentially" and then figuring that out.  If it was always sequential you could make it easy and just stop after the first device if the user is busy as you mentioned above.

It would also be useful to add to the actual ring group module  (and the group settings in smartpbx) in advanced call flow, but you would likely want more options since those are used not just for find me - follow me, but also sales ring groups.  Something like  "skip busy users" which just rings users that aren't busy instead of ringing all.

Anyways, hope that helps, and thanks again for your response!