Voicemail in the Call Center ACD

We are going to talk a bit about voicemail in this post. Whether you like or dislike voicemail as a whole, I think we can agree that it is a fairly important medium for communication. Personally, I am not a huge fan of leaving and/or checking voicemail, but I may very well be in the minority. Let us go over some of the ways to configure and use voicemail in the Q-Suite.

• Extension based voicemail – This is the most basic use case. You have an extension and you can configure your voicemail settings via the Asterisk menu that controls the voicemail module. The options and settings will be quite similar to the voicemail menus on your cell phone or land line. This use case is essential and must be configured prior to successfully leveraging the following situations.
• Direct to Voicemail – Using the visual dialplan builder, you can program certain call routes to be sent directly to a predefined voicemail extension, typically configured in the same manner as described in the first case. This component is popular when creating after hours dialplans.
• Queue Periodic Message + DTMF Option – In an inbound queue, you have the option to use a periodic message to announce to the caller that they may press a key for the ability to leave a voicemail as opposed to waiting in the queue. The DTMF option routes the caller to a dialplan, which would be configured using the first two cases.
• Voicemail to Email – This is a highly requested and desirable feature. For each extension defined in the Q-Suite, you have the option to send the voicemail as a file attachment to the specified email address. You can also choose whether or not you wish to delete the voicemail upon delivery. As many people are on the move, this will allow you to check voicemail on your cell phone as opposed to needing to use your actual extension.