futurePROOF – March edition

March 2012

Welcome to the March edition of futureProof, the newsletter for Altos resellers. We’ve several new features debuting this month, including easy call metric reports and the events diary. Many of the suggestions come direct from you and your customers – so keep them coming and we’ll keep developing the system for you. 

The MyPhones Team

Line Monitoring

Colleagues can now show each other when they’re free to take a call or already busy on a call, using the new Line Monitoring feature.

Line Monitoring uses spare lights on the 5 series phones or Attendant Console. It’s not only easy to set up, it’s also available to all users (with supported phones) as we’ve made it a feature of our standard Silver package.

FIND Line Monitoring > web portal > Company – Features – Line Monitoring

TOP TIP - you can also set spare lights as quick buttons to pick up ringing phones or as speed dial buttons for important numbers.

Reports & Statistics

We’ve created some basic call metrics reports to help your customers assess and monitor their call management policies.

The reports look at outcomes (calls answered, missed, voicemail); performance (time to answer), and volumes (across day / week), and allow customers to differentiate between inbound call handling and outbound campaigns. Reports can be printed or saved as pdf files.

Call metrics are just the start for reporting – we will be building on this over time and would be interested to hear what your customers would find most helpful.

FIND Reports & Statistics > web portal > Company – Reports

Event Diary

This neat little idea came from a Reseller whose customer wanted reminders of his customers’ birthdays. We made the idea more generic and came up with the Customer Event Diary.

We’ve started you off with some predefined event types, including birthday, anniversary, MOT test, dental appointment etc to show just how easy it is to set up your own categories specifically for your business. You then simply store your key dates against customers in the Company Address Book and Altos sends you a daily summary of any reminders that are due. Very simple and very effective.

FIND Customer Event Diary  > web portal > Company – Customer Event Diary

Shared Voicemail

Thanks to another suggestion from a Reseller (yes, you know who you are!), we’ve added new functionality to the Altos voicemail boxes. You can now create and forward calls to a shared voicemail box – a great feature for teams.

FIND Shared Voicemail > web portal > Account – Features – Messages – Voicemail (forwarding tab)

Number Presentation with IPDC SIP Trunks

You may be aware of issues relating to presenting the correct CLI when interoperating with the Gamma IPDC SIP Trunk product. Classically, this issue has cut across us when diverting an Altos number to a PSTN phone or when wishing to present a consistent number when making straight outbound calls to PSTN (sometimes known as “Outbound Alias”). Gamma are working on an overall fix, but in the meantime, we have developed a workaround for the Outbound Alias case so that the correct number will display on the target phone.

futurePROOF is our regular bulletin to keep you up-to-date on developments and to give you advance notice of system matters. futurePROOF is also about hearing from you and learning how you would like to see the system develop – so feel free to call or email us with your ideas and suggestions. Don’t forget that there is also a range of resources on the Cloud-Telephony Portal both for you and for your customers. It’s always worth taking a look – you never know when you might discover something new!