Hotline in the home office
Last year, the bottleneck for home offices was the shortage of headsets and laptops. Today, most companies have the hardware problem under control. Instead, they're struggling with the fact that hunt groups generally can't be managed from home. UC manufacturer C4B has a solution for this: with XPhone Connect, the communications specialist brings the hotline to the home office.
Munich, 21 September 2021. Whether external customer hotline or internal help desk: hunt groups often play a key role in company communications. But how do you organise queues when the majority of employees work from home on a regular basis? The Bavarian town of Deggendorf's municipal authority faced this problem too: on the one hand, since the first wave of Covid-19, almost the entire administration had been equipped with softphones and headsets. But because around 90% of calls come in via hunt groups, no more than 30 employees could ever be sent to work from home at any one time.
The solution was found in the Unified Communications solution XPhone Connect. Deggendorf's municipal authority has been using XPhone for a number of years now. With the last release, manufacturer C4B added hotline management to the software. The advantage: the hotline functionality is fully integrated in the normal client. Employees who manage a hotline can thus use their softphone and are no longer tied to a fixed workstation in the office.
Click & Collect for retail
Thanks to the new hotline management, all administrative areas not open to the public were made home office-compatible: "The pandemic means significantly more work for the administration. This could only be handled because many employees were able to work from home without functional restrictions," explains Thomas Seidl, network administrator for the Deggendorf municipal authority. "Without the ability to manage the hunt groups from home, it wouldn't have worked."
Additionally, with the help of the hotline management, the authority was able to implement a click & collect concept for the town's retail stores. As with any hotline, its success stands and falls with its availability. Thanks to the integrated analytics function, the municipality was able to evaluate the loss rate of its hunt groups for the first time: "We were really shocked at times how many calls could not be answered," explains Thomas Seidl, network administrator for the Deggendorf municipal authority. In response, he says, two additional hotline workstations were set up in the citizen service centre, which significantly improved the service level to the satisfaction of citizens.
Hotline for the vaccination centre
For the Traunstein district office, too, hunt groups gained in importance as a result of the Covid crisis. The district office set up a hotline to book appointments at the Covid vaccination centre. "We had already evaluated TeamDesk last year and had it checked and approved by our data protection officer," reports Peter Frimmel from the Traunstein district office. "The hotline is absolutely stable and reliable. Thanks to the analytics function, we know when the call load is particularly high and how long the wait times are. So the team can be beefed up immediately if required."