Holiday Greeting Best Practices

[jbbts]

Have a client who wants an easy way to activate Holiday Greetings for their 250.  My techs say to user Star and that is fine except when the client decides to close early the day before, and Star is not set to kick in.

Any creative ideas or work arounds, besides recording the Day and Night CRA's?

[dwayneg]

I usually use NIGHT MODE to over-ride regular schedule as needed.  You can invoke it from an admin phone, from the web interface, or by dialing into the configuration assistant.  So for your primary trunk group set a day destination to the schedule, night destination to the desired "closed" destination.  If you're using DIDs it's 1 step more complicated: build a second call routing table showing only the night exceptions (probably only main number) and set that destination to your "closed" destination.  At the BOTTOM of the list put a "+" for pattern, which means "any other number", and set that + to ring to your primary call routing table in order to route all the other DIDs.
Side benefit: the admin phones will all display "Night MODE" to remind users that they need to turn it off the next day.

[Hershel]

If you goal is to manually switch between day & night but also have a holiday schedule here is what I do

Day Mode - program as per normal and don't worry about holidays
Night Mode - point this at your STAR with the holiday schedule


STAR for Holidays
 - Program the default destination to be your typical Night Mode destination, this way if it is not a holiday it will go to your regular Night Greeting (or whatever)
 - Program the start times & dates for the holiday to include the afternoon of the work day before the holiday, so if they are closed July 1st set the start time for 2pm (or whatever) June 30th.  Because the STAR is only used when when the system is in Night Mode the early start time only matters when they are ready to leave and manually switch it.
 

[DND ON]

And yet another way to skin that cat...

My main DID is pointed to a phantom with two forward paths. Day forwards immediately to the STAR, night forwards immediately to the night auto attendant. Normal operation is receptionist does nothing, STAR handles day/night and holiday greetings. If they need to leave early, they put the system into night mode and the night greeting plays.

In case of inclement weather or a last minute decision to book out early for the holiday, I call into the Configuration Assistant and forward the phantom to the appropriate application. It takes about 30 seconds on my cell phone, because I always seem to be out of the office when they need it changed.

The phantom came about because my redundant SIP trunks are off-node, so day/night Call Routing Tables wouldn't work. The remote forwarding via Configuration Assistant was an added bonus.