Tips:
Getting more from your phone
 
Working with analog phones

• Call forward
• Personal greeting
• Passwords
• Urgent message
• Off-premises message delivery
• Guest mailboxes
• Group mailboxes
• Cascade paging mailboxes
• Q & A mailboxes

Call forward

• Your phone has been set by the Installer to forward calls (when your station is busy or does not answer) to your mailbox or other location. You can temporarily forward by dialing 5 6 5 and an extension number.
• When you forward your phone to another extension and that phone is busy or does not answer, the forwarded call will be returned to your mailbox.

Personal greeting

• Typically, one records his/her personal greeting and changes it only when he/she is going to be out for vacation or on a business trip.
• The usual greeting — “Hi, this is Bill. I can’t take your call now, so leave me a message at the tone or dial 0 for the operator.” — can become: “Hi, this is Bill. I’m out of the office till Friday. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you then, or you can either dial 1 2 2 for my secretary or 0 for the operator.” Notice that the ESI system lets the caller dial any extension or mailbox directly from your personal greeting.
• If you like to change your greeting often, to more accurately indicate your ability to return calls, you can pre-record up to three different greetings and then select them from the programming menu.
• As part of your greeting, you can selectively inform the caller of particular options that you may want to make available. These are the possible dialing options:

  Option	Function
  0	Reach the operator
  1	Skip to the record tone
  2	Mark the message as urgent
  3	To page (internally) the person for whom the caller is leaving a voice mail message
  4	To perform “off-premises “reach-me”*
  8	Return to the main greeting
  [xxx]	Transfer call to any three-digit extension or mailbox number on your ESI phone system (where [xxx] stands for a three-digit combination)

  *
  If your system is using ESI Presence Management, consult the Presence Management User’s Guide (ESI part # 0450-0793) to learn about additional, special functionality that may be available to you. If you’re not sure whether your system is using IVX Presence Management, consult your System Administrator. For more information about IVX Presence Management, visit www.esi-estech.com/presence.

Passwords

• Passwords are designed to safeguard your private messages. You can set up levels of protection depending on your privacy needs.
• If you don’t feel that anyone else is likely to try to listen to your messages, set your password to zero (think of “O for off”). Then, picking up messages will be much faster.
• If your office is private (or no one else is likely to use your phone), you can program a password but set it to apply only to remote pickup (from the outside, from another phone in the office, or by use of a Virtual Mailbox Key set on another phone).
• If your phone is easily accessible to others and/or you may have messages that you want to keep very secure, then set a long password (up to eight digits) and set the security level for all locations.

Urgent message

(ESI Communications Servers, IVX X-Class, and IVX E-Class only.)

• The urgent message feature allows you to be selective in allowing others to have their messages immediately forwarded or paged to you.
• In station programming, you can set the system to call/page you when any message is taken, or only when a message marked as urgent has been left.
• If you include the instructions in your personal greeting to press 2 to leave an urgent message, then only those messages so marked by the caller will be delivered/paged.
• You can also choose to turn on this feature but not include the instructions in your greeting. Then, only those who know to press 2 (such as a spouse or other employees) will be able to page you.

Off-premises message delivery

• Off-premises message delivery consists of two ways to deliver messages that can be used independently, or in conjunction with each other. A variety of programmable settings give you and/or the System Administrator numerous ways for your messages to get to you.
• A delay period can be set before the delivery is attempted. This gives you the chance to pick up the message from your desk if you happen to be in the office. The interval between attempts is programmable to provide the perfect balance between reminder and annoyance.
• The quiet period for phone delivery can prevent the system from calling you at home after 10:00 pm.
• You can even set the system to call your car phone and, if it gets no answer, to page you. Or, you can have the system call your car phone and page you at the same time.
• When you have the system call you with messages, you will hear: “Please enter your password.” If you have a password set, you simply enter the password. If you don’t have a password set, you must enter 0 to signal the system to start playback of your messages.
• If you have phone delivery set for your home, be sure to tell others in the household that the system might call. If they enter ∗ when the password is requested, the system won’t try again until another new message is taken. Without the entry of ∗, the system will continue to ring your home phone at set intervals.

Guest mailboxes

• Guest mailboxes are usually used for personnel who don’t have a phone assigned to them — such as outside reps, shipping personnel, or any other employees who don’t require phones. Assign guest mailboxes to such personnel, and they can appear to outside callers just like any other employees. You can list them in the auto attendant directory. They can have their “extension” number printed on their business cards, or have spouses dial their mailbox number at the auto attendant.

Group mailboxes

• Group mailboxes allow for messages to be placed in the mailboxes for all members of the group. If you have several sales reps, place them in a group mailbox, so that you can easily leave the same message for all.
• A group mailbox actually creates messages in its members’ mailboxes so that each member can handle his copy of the message individually.

Cascade notification mailboxes

• Use cascade notification mailboxes if you want to be assured that important after-hour messages — such as emergency service calls for techs on duty — are returned. For example, if your Service Department is closed at night but you want to provide emergency service, have the Service Department’s calls forwarded to a cascade notification mailbox. A sample greeting might be: “You have reached the Service mailbox. If this is an emergency, dial 4 4 4 now or leave a detailed message at the tone and you’ll be called first thing in the morning.” Then, set up cascade notification mailbox 444 with a personal greeting such as: “This is the emergency service number. Leave a message at the tone and a tech will be paged to call you back. If this is not an emergency dial 2 0 6 now to return to the Service mailbox.” The cascade notification mailbox is then set up to page the tech who is “on-call.” But, as the name of the mailbox implies, you can have the system page additional techs if the emergency message isn’t answered within the response time you desire. You can have the paging escalate to three different pagers.
• A similar scenario can be used for sales after-hours, or for a department of reps on the road. The system can be set to notify the manager’s pager if a message isn’t answered within a certain time period. You can also create a Virtual Mailbox Key to allow the manager to monitor the mailbox in the morning, to assure that no messages have gone unanswered.

Q & A mailboxes

(ESI Communications Servers, IVX X-Class, and IVX E-Class only.)

• Q & A mailboxes let you record a series of questions for a caller to answer, allowing you to collect information that might otherwise take a great deal of time.
• Use this mailbox for people who are responding to an employment ad by having them answer questions that provide name, phone number, degree, last job held, how long worked there, etc. Use Q & A mailboxes for employee satisfaction polls or a suggestion box.
• Use Q & A for surveys, such as having customers rate how they were treated by your sales staff: name, phone number, nature of help, who helped them, rate satisfaction 1–10, complaints, etc.
• Use it for prospects who want additional information. Have employees transfer callers who are interested in a particular service or product to a Q & A mailbox to get more info.
• In the personal greeting for Q & A mailboxes, be sure to include instructions as to how to record answers: for example, “. . . After each question, you’ll hear a beep to begin recording. Press 1 after each answer to advance to the next question. Please state your name at the tone.” Be sure the caller is informed during the last question that it is the final question, and whether the call will then be transferred or disconnected.
• Need more than 10 questions? Set forwarding for the mailbox to another Q & A mailbox and use its 10 questions to serve as questions 11–20.