Friday Feature: Shim Calling Applet

This post is part of our Friday Feature series where we look at a part of the NewVoiceMedia platform that you might not be familiar with but we think you might find useful!

In today's Friday Feature Luke Lihou from our Professional Services team is going to explore the Shim calling applet. This feature enables you to pass calls from one call plan directly into another call plan.

"If you imagine a company with many hundreds of helplines it can be un-manageable to build a call plan for each of them." explains Luke.

"As well as taking a huge amount of time to build and maintain hundreds of call plans it can be virtually impossible for Supervisors and Customer Service Directors to keep up with what is happening in real-time across the entire business."

Master call plans can be used to cover numbers that require similar routing and the Shim applet is used to direct your multiple inbound numbers into the single master call plan.

Luke explains how he solved this problem for one of his larger clients, "I recently designed a master call plan for one of my Enterprise clients because they have hundreds of helpline numbers all with individual call plans and it made reporting and real-time management incredibly difficult."

"The way that I designed their plan condenses their queues so that they only need to monitor a handful rather than hundreds of queues making real-time management easy. I also organised their reporting capabilities as they didn’t target queues in their reports making it easy to report by helpline name."

Luke has one other good use of the Shim calling applet, "Putting master call plans to one side, there are other benefits of the Shim calling applet, namely that you can pass a call through to a defined point in a call plan on another number. This could be useful to save time by avoiding announcements on the separate line and passing the call directly through to the ACD - perhaps for a Premier Support number."

Luke is always on the look out for customers who have multiple numbers coming in to their business, especially over multiple sites or multiple countries. It can seem simple to build a call plan for each number, but spending a bit of time uncovering similarities across these many numbers can pay dividends with ongoing management and reporting.

Have you used the Shim applet in your call plan? How are you using it?

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