Call Pickup with colima Cerebro

Call Pickup is a long known feature of telephone systems, there is virtually no telephone system that does not support such a function. The sense of the function is that an employee can accept a call on his telephone, which is currently ringing on a different phone. In addition he can also “pick up” the call during the call.

The following video provides a brief preview of the colima Cerebro module “Call Pickup”:

Application areas for Call Pickup

In most cases, call pickup is used in small teams, where employees have access to the phones and workplaces of their colleagues and simply pick up a call should the colleague not be at work. Even with managers and secretaries the pick-up function is quite frequently found, for example, if the secretary is not at her workplace and her superior still wants to take a call that is ringing in the hall.

However, the Call Pickup function is completely useless in areas that require a high customer service and a quick answer, such as call centers or in direct inbound telephone sales. In this field pick up solutions have been tried to be adapted usefully for many years, but ultimately only a proper ACD can redirect calls to targeted available employees and also through clever response management provide the desired customer service.

Group Call Pickup and Direct Pickup

“Group Call Pickup” is directed, as its name implies, to a group of employees in the “old world phone” and often to a group of telephone terminals. Employees can pick up calls from other employees that are configured in the same group neither knowing nor dialing their extension number.

Direct Pickup on the other hand allows, specific, direct picking up of a call by a specific employee or apparatus. This requires either the extension number to be transferred in the process, a pre-assigned key or klicking on the corresponding icon on the Desktop Client.

Call Pickup with Microsoft Lync 2010

The Call Pickup feature is completely missing from Lync Client which is otherwise equipped with all the required telephony functions, but also the Lync phone is not provided with this function. Apparently, Microsoft has not valued this function highly and therefore did not implement it, or intentionally left a door open for a third-party.

In the meantime there are a handful of vendors worldwide that offer Call Pickup for Microsoft Lync or will soon introduce it to the market. The high demand and excellent flow of information is the driving point for vendors in this market. Often major projects are on the verge of deciding for or against Lync 2010 due to this supposedly minor feature.

Selecting the right solution

Important in the selection are the following criteria *:

• Does Call Pickup only function between Lync Client to Lync Client or can a call to hardware phones also be picked up?
• Are Lync compatible phones supported regardless of make and model? Is the purchase of certain models required and do I therefore enter a dependency, and eventually have to decide for a non-prefered model?
• Must Lync Client always be running on the Desktop to initiate the Call Pick by phone? Must there be a connection between phone and PC?
• Where are Pickup groups administered? On each PC (especially interesting for installations with thousands of devices!) or centrally, for example, directly in Active Directory (AD)?
• Who administers the pick-up groups? If every employee is responsible for the supervision of “his” Pickup Groups himself then the need for organizational effort increases and the chances of an incorrect configuration rises dramatically.
• Who may be in which and how many groups? How many Pick-up Groups, and is this number sufficient for the company?
• Is an installation of client software on the PC or the upgrade of the software on the phone necessary? Also here the effort for deployment and administration for large installations are not to be underestimated.
• Does the employee originally called receive a notification that he has missed a call and which colleague it was successfully picked up by? This is important for customer communication.
• Can the person before picking up the call see who the call was for originally? This information is important, for example, if the employee does not speak the requisite language and so has to redirect the call to another colleague.
• Can the person before picking up the call see who the call was for originally? This information is important, for example, if the employee does not speak the requisite language and so another colleague can pick up the call.
• Does the selected solution cover other important functions or do I have to apply other third-party components?

Call Pickup with colima Cerebro

If you are interested in colima Cerebro Call Pickup, please either contact our sales team or download a 30day trial version free of charge here: http://www.colima.de/de/produkte/cerebro.html

* colima Cerebro fulfills all of the above mentioned points as the first and only solution. Worldwide.