Call center / Fire drill setup

[djones]

Hello all. 

I have a situation that I have not been able to find an answer to anywhere...hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

The Short:
I have to find a why to have a subset of hunt group phones to ring on cell phones.

The Long:
I work for a co. that receives anywhere from 300 - 1000 phone calls in a day...those phone calls MUST be answered within 30 sec. due to government regulations.  The problem arises when there is a fire drill/emergency in the building.  When the bells go off, the entire call center must leave the building; but those phone still have to be answered.

The idea came up to have some of the phones on the hunt groups divert to/ forward/to cell phones; or to setup dynamic ext's for some of the hg phones.  My research and experiments tells me that this can't be done...maybe I missed something?

I've thought of the idea of creating an additional application that would reroute the calls to cell phones; but that would require someone to log into the system and reroute the calls to that app when the bells go off...not the best answer when you're away from your desk half of the time.  Plus I think I'd still have to setup hunt groups for the various depts.

Has anyone ever dealt with a situation like this?

My background?  Desktop support tech that inherited a Mitel 5000CP system and 40 person (and growing) call center)

Any information that can point me into the right direction for this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

[dwayneg]

Your problem is that hunt group calls NEVER follow twinning.
Okay, this is just a theory and I haven't tested it yet:
Set up phantoms with twinned cells, enough for peak calls to group.
For each phantom build a Call Routing Announcement, delete default VM  message, time out to phantom.  Maybe include message saying you're in an emergency situation. This CRA breaks the tie, it's no longer a HG call.
Build a new hunt group, distributed routing, that includes the CRAs as only members.
I believe you'll now find that calls to this group will go to one of the cells, next call to next cell etc.
Problems: this is not a real HG, calls won't move to next agent if not answered.  Also calls will not hold if agent is unavailable, they'll go to next CRA regardless.  Possibly solve both of these with purpose built VM greetings on each phantom's mailbox.

You could have primary HG recall to emergency HG if unanswered in X seconds, to make it automatic, or have a user change routing directly to emergency group using an additional phantom, DND and sys fwd to change path.

If you try it let us know, it would be another trick to add to our trick bag.

[Tech Electronics]

Drones,

Have you tried to do a manual forward to a cell phone one of the hint group member phones?

If that works for you then you can just have each agent manually forward their phone to one of the cells.

Thanks,

TE

[DND ON]

You need a real disaster recovery/business continuity plan, not something cobbled together with cell phones. That could take many forms; including companies that specialize in providing that exact service.

We use a combination of CLAR (Customer Location Alternate Routing) for our POTS and PRI services, and an AT&T web portal to reroute our SIP trunks. I can redirect any of our approximately 500 numbers at 70 offices in about a minute.

You should have a conversation with your carrier to determine what services are available, and take it from there.

[djones]

Thank you for all of the responses.

Tech Electronics,
That is the first thing that I tried...works for regular calls and it works if you are forwarding to an internal extension; but not to cell phones.

DND ON,
I know that you are absolutely right and that is probably where it will go when they are ready to spend the money and I (or someone else) is able to put the whole plan together.

dwayneg,
I will try that when I get some time...hopefully today.

Thanks again all!