Creating New Response Group in Six Steps: Microsoft Communications Server Forum Shows the Way

By Madhubanti Rudra, TMCnet Contributor

Microsoft (News - Alert), in one of its Communications Server Forum Newsletter, has offered tips for Creating and Delegating a New Response Group in six steps. Response Group Service typically enables administrators to create and configure one or more small response groups for the purpose of call treatment, queuing and routing incoming phone calls to one or more designated agents. These response groups can be deployed in departmental or workgroup environments and in entirely new telephony installations.

Microsoft Communications Server Forum, formerly OCS Forum, provides classroom and webseminar training as well as a non-production environment for those IT departments without additional equipment, budget or time. This allows planners and users to test ideas, dial in and dial back out, IM file transfers, remote desktop sharing, video conferencing, run scenarios, review logs, break linkages and learning about new telephony features and network access.

MCS Forum is also designed for both the system integrator/consultant who wants to learn about MCS without having to build their own system as well as the enterprise customer who doesn't have the time, resources or knowledge to develop one. MCS Forum Labs are designed to be 'hands-on' or 'over-the-shoulder' with experts available for Q&A and classes for feature-specific review. MCS Forum is a vendor-independent laboratory environment designed for learning, technical guides, knowledge resources and online 'live' services. MCS Forum provides planning, project management, consulting, training, case studies, white papers, speaking engagements, market/customer research, network planning and other services.

The Microsoft Communications Server Forum newsletter has demarcated a number of areas, where Response Group Service can be used for the best results. These areas include, an internal helpdesk, customer service desk, or general external call handler.

Response Group Service is designed to directly benefit the users. And thus the maintenance costs should go down directly to the users. Response Group Service works with Office Communicator, or 'OC,' and the new OC Attendant to accomplish just that. Response Group Service also supports incoming calls from the local carrier network. Agents can use Communicator, Communicator Phone (News - Alert) Edition, or Office Communicator Attendant.

Here are the six steps, identified by Microsoft for creating and delegating a new response group

1. OCS Administrator chooses from Basic and Advanced Templates.

2 - Delegates administration of Response Group to a user.

3 - Group Administrator selects existing DL or creates customer group.

4 - Group Administrator defines TTS-Text-To-Speech voice prompts.

5 - Group Administrator sets routing type e.g. round robin.

6 - Group Administrator sets Queue timeout/overflow actions.

Seven Steps in Basic Response Group Flow

1 - Call hits new Response Group.

2 - Menu prompt is played.

3 - Caller selects voice recognition or 'touch tone' DTMF-dual tone multi-frequency

4 - Call transferred to agent queue.

5 - Music onhold is provided.

6 - Call is sent to all agents who are signed-in and available.

7 - Call is answered by available agent.

MCS Forum Expo 2010 will be held in Boulder, Colorado, June 15 & 16 at the St. Julien Hotel  with keynotes from MCS MVPs, Media Gateway (News - Alert)/SBC experts, customers, planners and others. Attendees and exhibitors will receive thousands of dollars in valuable videos, training courses and online access to a 'live' MCS system. There will be sessions on OCS Planning, QoS, Security, Firewalls, Media Gateways, PBX (News - Alert) Integration, Mobile MCS, Communicator, WAN-Bandwidth Planning, Customer Applications, Troubleshooting, Session Border Controllers and others.

(source: http://call-center-services.tmcnet.com/topics/call-center-services/articles/86383-creating-new-response-group-six-steps-microsoft-communications.htm)