A customer may contact a single number: the secretary answers the calls and forwards them to the appropriate persons. If the secretary does not answer, is on the phone or is in ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode, all the calls are sent directly to the sales group. While IBC is looking for the right contact, the calling customer can hear a personalized ‘welcome’ message that can be recorded by any IBC administrator.

Technically speaking, the secretary as well as the member of the sales group should be member of a hunt group with priorities (where the secretary has got the highest priority). If all lines of the sales group are busy, the call can be forwarded to an overfl ow phone number.

Customers can contact a company’s hotline for technical support or information requests. The customer should call a phone number during hotline working hours. If the customer calls outside working hours, he should get a voice message indicating that the company’s hotline is open Xyz days and at Xyz time. Alternatively, all nights/week-end calls could be forwarded to a mobile phone if an employee is on-duty.

During working hours, the call should be forwarded to a group of hotline staff. If they are all busy, the caller could get a message inviting to call later or the caller could be connected to another group of hotline staff serving only for backup.

An auto-attendant is an Interactive Voice Responder (IVR) playing messages and collecting digit inputs from caller to connect the caller to the desired extension or to provide the requested information. Let us take an example: a company number plays a welcome message and offers to press some digits to be connected to various company’s department.
N.B.:

• Several level of menus can be created. Several autoattendants can be created in the system and configured via an user-friendly graphical interface.
• During night/week-end, it is possible to simply play a message announcing that the company
is closed.

OneAccess has worked out an automated installation procedure adapted to several IP phone vendors. The installation of such IP phones is truly plug’n’play: take the product out of its carton box, plug it to the LAN and the configuration of the IP phone is generated on-the-fly by the OneAccess product. The IP phone configuration is completed tuned to work with OneAccess and contains the installation profile parameters. The IP phone inherits a phone number in a range specified for auto-installation and it also gets provisioned in the OneAccess system (for the specified MAC address, all installation profile characteristics become active). If the installer wants to assign another number, he simply needs to dial a special number with admin password: then, configuration changes are saved in OneAccess system and in phone configuration. The IP phone reboots automatically with the new configuration (containing the new phone number).

Schematically:

The end-users are usually not willing to consult a manual to learn how to use advanced voice services. Actually the wide majority of users only understand what few features are and most of them don’t even use them. For example, most users do not understand what the ‘Do Not Disturb’ service is.
But more importantly, they will not even ask themselves if a service (that they could call ‘Do Not Disturb’ or something else) could solve their problem. To summarize, two challenges must be addressed:

• Make the most common voice services easy to understand and easy to setup
• Provide an intuitive user interface, so that the user becomes curious to discover the benefi ts of new advanced services

Legacy PBX systems usually propose many services, whose programming is made by entering a series of digits on the phone. Such way of programming defi nitely does not help user acceptance.
Using a web interface or emails has become familiar to most users. Many people use the web to accomplish quite advanced tasks, such as making online reservation. The web is easy to learn and well designed pages are self-explanatory.

The context-sensitive help keeps the web page presentation compact and easy to browse. It also allows any ‘curious’ user to learn more on PBX service. Also a simple thing such as listening to voice mail can be quite cumbersome to use: users may not know how to suppress messages while they are played or how to listen to the messages while being on the move. OneAccess products can send voice mail to an email account, thus making it easy to listen to voice mail from anywhere.