Thursday 26 August 2010

Parking phone calls vs transferring

From what I've seen, "call parking" is more common and far easier to understand than call transfers on office phone systems. As long as the volume of transferred calls is small enough never to overflow the one or two "parked call" buttons, it's much easier to just park a call, call the forwarding extension, then explain that so-and-so is waiting on Park 1. This also has the advantage of allowing the forwarding party to pick up again if there is no answer, and for the call to wait a few seconds until the new recipient is ready. To see how much more intuitive it is, try drawing a diagram of call forwarding without using an extra location for the call that waits in limbo to be transferred.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In case you're not familiar, "parked" calls are just on hold.
PPS - And anyone can pick up.

2 comments:

Mark said...

I like your post about the phone. Have you ever tried for your blog? If not, you must try for your blog.

John said...

I have tried both methods, so I'm speaking from personal experience. I don't think I have ever successfully transferred a phone call the old way, but I've parked calls and picked up parked calls without any hassles. It's not an exciting story, but the best tech is invisible anyway.