Let office employee change IVR message and close office for inclement weather

[bradgarrison]

I have a client who wants one of their employees to be able to close the office during inclement weather. In the case that the office is closed, they want the employee to be able to call into the phone system, enter a prompt and pin, and then make a recording on the phone that callers will hear saying the office is closed. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, does someone already have something in place similar to this?

I have been working with this client for almost 10 years and they have only closed the office maybe 2 or 3 times because of emergency or bad weather. In the past, I used 3cx and forced the office closed and played a message stating the office was closed for emergency/bad weather. The next business day I would change the status back to open and the regular IVR would take over. If possible, they would like to do this on their own.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Brad

 

[viiiwonder]

Call flow at the start of the inbound call route, pin protected. ’Regular’ route goes to wherever calls go now, ‘alternate’ route goes to an IVR. Use ‘Recordings’ app to control the recording for the greeting. Put whatever (or no) options in the IVR you want.

This would give you two dial plan concepts to have the staff member call to either toggle the flow, or to change the greeting.

In order to facilitate it, you’d probably best create a new, for-this-concept-only DID that goes to an IVR for the staff member to call directly into and then get to these dial options. Obviously, pin protect as much as you can.

The whole thing is ridiculous, the instructions for it will be two pages long and full of concepts that a lay person won’t understand. They’re going to be confused by the various prompts to follow to re-record greetings, etc. In the end, you’ll have to get involved anyways.

You’ll have to engineer all of it, write the documentation, and go through at least 1 round of doing it for the staff member anyways…

If you can embed it into a workflow they do often, this might not be the case. For instance: a day/night mode button and the staff member knowing how to put in an ad hoc voicemail greeting on the night mode voicemail. Smaller chance of this being a cluster if they are just doing something they do occasionally anyways.

You could create a custom user group with permissions to the various GUI concepts to do these things… I don’t believe you can record greetings from the web though - probably my least favorite option to recommend.

 

[bradgarrison]

Call flow at the start of the inbound call route, pin protected. ’Regular’ route goes to wherever calls go now, ‘alternate’ route goes to an IVR. Use ‘Recordings’ app to control the recording for the greeting. Put whatever (or no) options in the IVR you want.

This would give you two dial plan concepts to have the staff member call to either toggle the flow, or to change the greeting.

In order to facilitate it, you’d probably best create a new, for-this-concept-only DID that goes to an IVR for the staff member to call directly into and then get to these dial options. Obviously, pin protect as much as you can.

The whole thing is ridiculous, the instructions for it will be two pages long and full of concepts that a lay person won’t understand. They’re going to be confused by the various prompts to follow to re-record greetings, etc. In the end, you’ll have to get involved anyways.

You’ll have to engineer all of it, write the documentation, and go through at least 1 round of doing it for the staff member anyways…

If you can embed it into a workflow they do often, this might not be the case. For instance: a day/night mode button and the staff member knowing how to put in an ad hoc voicemail greeting on the night mode voicemail. Smaller chance of this being a cluster if they are just doing something they do occasionally anyways.

You could create a custom user group with permissions to the various GUI concepts to do these things… I don’t believe you can record greetings from the web though - probably my least favorite option to recommend.

Thank you for the response and all the details; this gives me a good starting point to set up a proof of concept. It might work a lot better if I create a generic message that says the office is temporarily closed and allow them to toggle that message on and off. If I can eliminate them recording a message on the fly that would greatly simplify the process. I like your idea of using a different DID. If I cannot make this simple for them, I really don't want to do it.