Fonality Upgrade Lets Agents Work Anywhere

Fonality Upgrade Lets Agents Work Anywhere

Open source telephony vendor Fonality has added several new features and capabilities to its IP PBX-based call center product. Version 3.5 of PBXtra Call Center Edition, introduced last week, will let sales or support agents receive calls from the queue no matter where they are or what kind of phone they’re using. It will also let administrators flexibly route calls to different offices as needed, and let supervisors oversee agents anywhere in the world. And as always, the company portrays the upgrade in terms of bringing yet more high-end enterprise telephony features to small businesses.

Fonality’s call center product targets companies with from two to 200 agents. In the past, all of those agents would have had to be sitting in an office to receive the sales or support calls, according to CEO Chris Lyman. “Now they can work from home, from a laptop running a soft phone, or, and I’m pretty sure nobody else has this, they can even participate in queue calls on their cellphones,” he says. Significantly, this can happen without special capabilities or client software in either home or cellular phones. Agents using such phones need simply press a key to accept the customer call. If they don’t, the system routes it to the next agent on the list. “We wanted to make sure the calls weren’t getting dumped into voice mail,” Lyman explains.

While the “agents anywhere” capability automatically distributes calls regardless of agents’ location, the new version also lets administrators specify the routing of calls more precisely. A company may decide, for example, to reroute calls from its Los Angeles office to a branch in Chicago, once the number of callers in the queue reaches a certain number. “Sharing agents between branch offices lets you get very sophisticated with resource allocation,” Lyman notes.