When using the Skype for Business or Lync Response Group service (RGS), agents need to have a status of available or inactive to be delivered calls. This makes a lot of sense for a lot of use cases, however close every deployment I have been involved with has a use case to deliver calls regardless of the users presence. The best example is a user who is not always active on their PC, but is within earshot to answer calls, or the user only has a desk phone with no presence. You might say this is a minor issue, but when you consider the default Lync away timer is 10 minutes, and the behavior for Outlook meetings is to set presence to busy, issues with call delivery will crop up more than you expect.
Luckily there is little known way to deliver Response Group calls regardless of presence – In the RGS Group select the “Routing Method” of “Attendant”:
Strictly speaking this mode is designed for Attendant Consoles, but it will achieve call delivery to agents regardless of their presence. The downside to using this mode without an Attendant Console, is that all calls in the queue will be delivered to the agent at the same time. If you have medium to high call volume this can be very distracting and confusing, because the agent will receive multiple call notification popups for each call in the queue. Attendant Consoles are designed to manage this, the standard Skype for Business and Lync clients are not.
Other Options
If Attendant Mode isn’t for you there are some things you can do to help ensure your users are available to receive calls.
- Often calendars are used for tasks and reminders casing further problems for call routing. This can be alleviated somewhat if you remember to set this type of calendar entry to “Free”:
- The default Skype for Business or Lync client away timer can be increased by selecting the settings cog at the top right of the client, or navigating to “Tools” -> “Options” -> “Status”:
You could also look to enforce this globally using a script or something else that can modify the registry:
Note that the inactive timer has to expire before the away timer starts. This means that you will only show as away once the total of the inactive and away timer has elapsed. If you have an an inactive timer of 5 minutes and an away timer of 15 minutes, you will show as away after 20 minutes. - Take a look at UC Extend – the presence switcher capability may be of some assistance
What else should I know about call routing?
Call forwarding and Simultaneous Ring will not be executed for response group calls – this is by design as typically you don’t want calls to be forward outside of the control of the the Response Group Service. Calls to DDI’s will always ring and forward.