How Can VoIP Call Parking Help your Business?

VoIP call parking is one of the features that is usually included in the basic packages by most hosted VoIP providers.

It can be a powerful tool in certain situations where putting the caller on hold is not the best solution.

What is call parking?

Call parking allows the user to ‘park’ a particular call in a numbered location for later retrieval – usually no more than one or two minutes – from another location, phone or another employee.

The phone system assigns a temporary extension for the parked call and the caller hears the usual company hold music.

This call can be retrieved after a while or sent to voicemail if it is not answered within a predetermined time.

How is VoIP call parking different from other call features?

Call parking may appear to be a superfluous feature when calls can be put on hold or transferred to another extension very easily.

Parking a call is generally used in situations where the other employee is not at their desk or their location is unknown. It is also used to transfer calls between offices and different devices when the extension number is not available.

In such circumstances, call transfers and call holds are not useful since the employee does not know the extension number to which the call has to be shifted.

How is call parking useful for a business?

Though call parking is frequently utilized in customer care and sales departments, its usefulness extends throughout the organization.

It is widely used in organizations which have many buildings or sections spread over multiple floors. This feature is also convenient for medium or large organizations where there are too many extensions to keep track of.

Since calls can be retrieved from a parked location remotely, employees working from home, traveling, or working on client sites can also talk to customers or partners regardless of who actually answered the call.

In most cases, the system can ring back the parked call if it is not answered within a preset time and transfer it back to the original extension.

Use cases for VoIP call parking

Call parking is best used in situations where it is inadvisable to direct the call to voicemail or where employees move around a lot.

1. Suppose a client calls an accounting business but the manager in charge of the account is talking to another executive in the HR department. The receptionist can park the call, inform the manager through the intercom and the call can be retrieved from any phone in the HR department.
2. This feature is also useful in large industrial complexes or hospitals which have a paging system for employees. Incoming calls can be parked, the particular employee can be paged and the call answered no matter where the worker is at the moment.
3. A customer calls the sales department with a query about bulk pricing but all the agents are currently busy. The front desk can contact the sales manager and provide the extension of the parked call to handle the customer instead of sending them to voicemail.