A lesser known feature of the Call Queuing Engine available with BVoIP’s Cloud PBX offering is called External Agent. An external agent is a user that needs to be added to a call queue but not associated with the phone system via a VoIP hard phone or soft phone.
Outside Employee
Effectively, you would be associating an extension number with an outside number like +12155551212. That means when that external agent is in a queue they would start to receive calls to that outside number as the queue strategy (round robin, prioritized hunt, etc) goes through its paces.
Example:
I have a sales person who has a hard line or mobile phone and I want to include them on queue calls. I would create an external agent with their full outside number and then have the system route calls to that person’s line to answer incoming calls going to the sales queue.
Bridged Phone System Extension
The same strategy could be used when trying to take extensions from a “bridged PBX” and include them as part of a call queue on the other side. (In a bridged phone system environment calls between extensions on both sides can feel like they are all on one big phone system rather than individual systems)
Example:
I have two offices each with their own separate PBX instance. I bridge the two PBX so that calls can pass between PBX 1 and PBX 2. I have an operator in each office and I want to leverage both receptionists to be able to answer receptionist calls coming into each office. Since each receptionist have extensions on the separate PBX”s you could use the external agent feature to include each remote extension into Call Queues on both sides.
Things to consider:
- External Agents would definitely double up on simultaneous or concurrent calls paths. That means for every call that comes in and goes back out 2 paths are being used. This has to play a part in instance sizing as well as how many outside lines you have available and costing especially if you pay per minute for outside calls.
- If an external agent’s voicemail picks up (like a cell phone voicemail) then the call would end there. In our first example we added an external agent to a sales queue. If for some reason that person’s cell phone goes straight to voicemail, then instead of routing the call to the next available agent’s external.
- There is no way for an external agent to log in or out of the call queue on their own. Only someone with access to the phone system management console could affect those changes.
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