I just started using the new contact center and was exploring its softphone features and was hoping that I could upgrade my operator from using a physical phone with a sidecar filled with speed dial buttons to answering and forwarding calls from the new Call Center softphone. While it looked promising, I ran into an issue with the contact list used for forwarding calls. Our salespeople all have their own personal dial plans and personal queues to allow customers to wait for their salesperson to become available if the salesperson is on the phone. When calls come in, our operator first identifies if the salesperson is in the office, out to lunch, or logged in/out of their queue indicating their availability. The operator then forwards the incoming call either directly to the person's voicemail using a speed dial 0extension# or to the salesperson's dial plan extension (not their line extension).
The contact list (used for forwarding) in the new contact center appears to populate from users, lines and maybe phone DID's within the Jive system where the line is not omitted from the directory. Dial plan extensions are not populated and are not available in the new call center's contact list when trying to forward calls. When I tried to manually enter two additional contacts named Joe (voicemail) > 0ext# and Joe (Queue) > dial plan extension#, neither of these manually created contacts were available when forwarding calls within the new call center softphone system. This means that we cannot transition our operator off of her 1970's style physical phone to a more modern softphone environment using Jive/Goto products. I believe that Jive's competitors have this capability and have a more robust operator softphone experience. The operator primarily forwards calls and they need to do so quickly and shouldn't be required to memorize or reference various extension numbers. It should all be built into the system. If Jive/Goto does not improve their operator softphone experience they will likely lose the business of larger customers who rely on and use operators extensively. Until these issues are addressed we will continue to use our legacy physical phone sidecar speed dial solution because the softphone environment is still limited for operator use and forwarding purposes. I read another suggestion recently that read that the speed dial soft buttons no longer supported dial plan extensions. I haven't run into this issue yet, but if it's true and if the "new" systems being rolled out exclude this capability this will negatively impact our operator's ability to forward calls to dial plan extensions which is NOT good. Please address these issues as part of your process of improving the operator softphone experience.
