RP Extension Ninja Skills

In Response Point, an "extension" isn't a physical phone.  It's a user.  You create users for the various employees and roles in your company, and you assign them to phones.  If you want to get fancy, you can even put more than one user on a phone, or a user on multiple phones.  Why? Well it turns out this is a really easy and flexible way for you to implement group behaviors in your site.

The primary type of user is called a "person".  Typically, you'd create one "person" for each employee.  Each "person" gets their own extension number, as well as voicemail box, call handling rules, and nick-names.  The nick-names are handy for customers to find your employees via speech recognition.  e.g. "Robert Brown" may actually be called "Rob" by those who know him (and in my case, sometimes "Bob" by those who don't know me).

For example, imagine your company has 10 employees in it.  You'd create 10 "person" users, and assign them to 10 phones.  This is analogous to the model of having one extension number per phone.  Except you and your customers can voice-dial them.  So far so good.

Now, let's say 5 of your employees work in a team called "support".  When a customer calls "support" you want all five of those phones to ring.  What to do?  There's another type of user called "Job Role", which is like a "Person", except that it just has a simple name, and is intended to represent a job, not a person.  So in my example, you'd create a "Job Role" user called "Support" and assign it to all the phones of the people who work in support - in addition to the "Person" users already assigned to those phones.  Now each phone has its person user and the "Support" user.  Say you've hired me onto your support team (thanks), somebody can call and ask for "Robert Brown", and my phone will ring, or ask for "Support" and my phone will ring along with the other support people's phones.  My phone is both my phone, and part of a group.  I can manage my own voicemail, call forwarding rules, etc, and the "support" group can have its own voicemail and call forwarding settings (maybe the voicemail is forwarded to the team's email distribution group, and un-answered calls are forwarded to the cell phone of lucky employee who is on call this week).

You can keep going in this vain.  For example, three of your employees work in "sales", and you want calls for "sales" to go to those users.  Just do the same thing: create a "sales" job role and assign it to the sales people's phones.  What if one of your employees is in both sales and support?  Just put both job roles on their phones.

It's simple, but it's powerful.  Give it a try.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 14, 2009
  There have been lots of posts all over the web about how cool RP’s speech recognition is.  But every