About us:
We currently have need for five phones at our small home health agency. We offer non-skilled companion and personal care services to our elderly clients where our staff go into the home to provide care for periods of 3 to 24 hours per day, and between 1 and 7 days per week, depending on the client. Because of the very personal nature of the care we provide and the average age of our clients, we try to have a human being answer the phone 24/7.
What we have now (inherited from previous owner):
Presently a Vonage phone system with two ATAs are being used to provide four incoming lines to 4-line analog phones. The Vonage ATAs are presently on a 3mb/1mb Brighthouse Networks cable Internet service that is dedicated to the phone system. When people call the main number it rolls over to lines 2, 3, or 4 if lines are busy. The numbers that correspond to lines 2, 3 and 4 are not given out but are presently visible to people if we call from those lines. There is a Muzak box that injects on-hold audio tied into the system. For some unknown reason incoming calls regularly get disconnected. We are using this as an excuse to upgrade to current technology. At night the phones are forwarded to the cell phone of whoever is on call.
The new system:
We are interested in setting up a PIAF or similar system hosted by rentpbx.com or similar. We already have two Aastra 57i CT phones, 1 Aastra 57i, and two Linksys SPA962s in storage. Because the heavy lifting has already been done with the Aastra phone programming as shown here: http://nerdvittles.com/?p=207, we would like to benefit from that effort. We don’t have to use the Linksys phones and could acquire a couple of additional Aastra’s to keep everything the same in the office. With everything we’ve written here, we are open to suggestions. You guys are the experts. . .
We have an unused number (several actually) parked with voip.ms that we can use for testing and then port the main business number to voip.ms or similar once we know that everything is working well.
The system needs to be able to do the following during work hours:
Callers call in to a single phone number and all phones in the office will ring. Anyone can answer. We need to be able to transfer phones within the office, either attended or unattended and would like to do attended transfers to the mobile phones of staff that are on the road. We would like to set up a table/database of known phone numbers that will have a code prepended to the name to indicate whether the caller is a client, a caregiver, a referral source, or someone else. This is because we are new owners and don’t know who’s who yet and this will help us keep things straight. Although we might not start off with this, we want to have the ability to handle calls differently depending on the callers caller-ID. For example, if a caregiver calls in, it would be nice to have their calls ring first to the schedule coordinator, but any of us could answer it or let it go to the schedule coordinator’s voice mail. If a referral source calls, it will go simultaneously to first the nurse’s phone and cell phone and then to the rest of the office if the nurse doesn’t pick up within a certain number of seconds. Whenever a call is placed on hold, we want to play an audio file of our choosing that talks about the business.
The system needs to be able to do this after business hours:
At this point all after-hours calls are forwarded to a single individual’s cell phone and that is what we will start with. We would like the option to make it so that we can send the caller to different numbers depending on the caller ID of who is calling, as follows: For all calls except from a referral source calls, calls will ring to the cell of the person on call that night. If a referral source calls, it will ring the nurse’s cell phone. Voicemail needs to be available if someone doesn’t answer their cell phone. I suppose that it could be the actual cell phone voice mail if that is necessary, but it would be nice for the system to bring them back to leave a message on the business phone system which would then alert the appropriate individual to the voice message by sending a text message or other notification and maybe even transcribe the message to email.
Faxing:
We do send and receive a modest number of faxes using a traditional fax machine. We would like to change it so that our faxes come in via email and fax out via email or any other system. If this is not practical within PIAF, then we can do it with any existing service already on the market.
Time Frame:
We are ready to get started immediately with this project.
Calling all capable individuals:
We would like to work with someone who has the knowledge to do what we have listed above on the PBX side and is also familiar with the setup on the Aastra phones so that they will work as described in the linked article. We would like to find someone that can continue to work with us in the future when we need to make changes or fix problems. We want someone that understands the need to get things set up as cost effectively as practical but, at the same time, we do understand the specialized nature of this work. We do not want a system that we are clueless about and we would like to discuss the options for us to observe what is happening in the setup process, if that is doable. Yes, we realize that that might add to the total time it takes to set things up but understanding what is going on in the back end can help us learn about the capabilities of the system and can help us make better decisions going forward. We know that some people don’t like to have someone looking over their shoulder so we’ll forgo that if necessary – I know that I don’t like someone looking over my shoulder in many situations.
If you think that you might be a fit for working with us, please PM me or provide contact information in this thread and I will get back to you, hopefully in a very timely manner.
We currently have need for five phones at our small home health agency. We offer non-skilled companion and personal care services to our elderly clients where our staff go into the home to provide care for periods of 3 to 24 hours per day, and between 1 and 7 days per week, depending on the client. Because of the very personal nature of the care we provide and the average age of our clients, we try to have a human being answer the phone 24/7.
What we have now (inherited from previous owner):
Presently a Vonage phone system with two ATAs are being used to provide four incoming lines to 4-line analog phones. The Vonage ATAs are presently on a 3mb/1mb Brighthouse Networks cable Internet service that is dedicated to the phone system. When people call the main number it rolls over to lines 2, 3, or 4 if lines are busy. The numbers that correspond to lines 2, 3 and 4 are not given out but are presently visible to people if we call from those lines. There is a Muzak box that injects on-hold audio tied into the system. For some unknown reason incoming calls regularly get disconnected. We are using this as an excuse to upgrade to current technology. At night the phones are forwarded to the cell phone of whoever is on call.
The new system:
We are interested in setting up a PIAF or similar system hosted by rentpbx.com or similar. We already have two Aastra 57i CT phones, 1 Aastra 57i, and two Linksys SPA962s in storage. Because the heavy lifting has already been done with the Aastra phone programming as shown here: http://nerdvittles.com/?p=207, we would like to benefit from that effort. We don’t have to use the Linksys phones and could acquire a couple of additional Aastra’s to keep everything the same in the office. With everything we’ve written here, we are open to suggestions. You guys are the experts. . .
We have an unused number (several actually) parked with voip.ms that we can use for testing and then port the main business number to voip.ms or similar once we know that everything is working well.
The system needs to be able to do the following during work hours:
Callers call in to a single phone number and all phones in the office will ring. Anyone can answer. We need to be able to transfer phones within the office, either attended or unattended and would like to do attended transfers to the mobile phones of staff that are on the road. We would like to set up a table/database of known phone numbers that will have a code prepended to the name to indicate whether the caller is a client, a caregiver, a referral source, or someone else. This is because we are new owners and don’t know who’s who yet and this will help us keep things straight. Although we might not start off with this, we want to have the ability to handle calls differently depending on the callers caller-ID. For example, if a caregiver calls in, it would be nice to have their calls ring first to the schedule coordinator, but any of us could answer it or let it go to the schedule coordinator’s voice mail. If a referral source calls, it will go simultaneously to first the nurse’s phone and cell phone and then to the rest of the office if the nurse doesn’t pick up within a certain number of seconds. Whenever a call is placed on hold, we want to play an audio file of our choosing that talks about the business.
The system needs to be able to do this after business hours:
At this point all after-hours calls are forwarded to a single individual’s cell phone and that is what we will start with. We would like the option to make it so that we can send the caller to different numbers depending on the caller ID of who is calling, as follows: For all calls except from a referral source calls, calls will ring to the cell of the person on call that night. If a referral source calls, it will ring the nurse’s cell phone. Voicemail needs to be available if someone doesn’t answer their cell phone. I suppose that it could be the actual cell phone voice mail if that is necessary, but it would be nice for the system to bring them back to leave a message on the business phone system which would then alert the appropriate individual to the voice message by sending a text message or other notification and maybe even transcribe the message to email.
Faxing:
We do send and receive a modest number of faxes using a traditional fax machine. We would like to change it so that our faxes come in via email and fax out via email or any other system. If this is not practical within PIAF, then we can do it with any existing service already on the market.
Time Frame:
We are ready to get started immediately with this project.
Calling all capable individuals:
We would like to work with someone who has the knowledge to do what we have listed above on the PBX side and is also familiar with the setup on the Aastra phones so that they will work as described in the linked article. We would like to find someone that can continue to work with us in the future when we need to make changes or fix problems. We want someone that understands the need to get things set up as cost effectively as practical but, at the same time, we do understand the specialized nature of this work. We do not want a system that we are clueless about and we would like to discuss the options for us to observe what is happening in the setup process, if that is doable. Yes, we realize that that might add to the total time it takes to set things up but understanding what is going on in the back end can help us learn about the capabilities of the system and can help us make better decisions going forward. We know that some people don’t like to have someone looking over their shoulder so we’ll forgo that if necessary – I know that I don’t like someone looking over my shoulder in many situations.
If you think that you might be a fit for working with us, please PM me or provide contact information in this thread and I will get back to you, hopefully in a very timely manner.
, though.
Phone System 