8. Presence Service:
Reach Your Party with a Single Phone Call

Presence service is a real-time service that gives you the information about the availability of your colleagues and their preferable ways to communicate.

The IP-phone interface of a presence service

Basically, with the presence service, your employees get two new opportunities.

At first, when you choose your co-worker you want to call, you can check his availability before placing a call.

The second benefit that the presence service offers is the ability to inform the communication network on your currently preferable methods of communication. When, for example, you are in the middle of important negotiations, you would probably appreciate a possibility to redirect all the incoming calls (office phone, mobile etc.) to your voicemail, but still let your boss reach you on your mobile. You simply configure the service, according to your preferences, and it will do the rest of the routine (like sending new status info to all the communication tools that your colleagues use to reach you).

How that could be useful for you or your sales force, who make so many calls in a day? With this service, you can guarantee that there will be no lost calls and the information about all the missed ones will be stored in a single place, waiting for your attention. You won't have to check numerous devices and voice-boxes to get this precious information any more. Take your time and work on every missed call without any haste.

When contacting your colleague with a presence service, you will see, if he is available before you dial his number. If your colleague has left the information about the preferable way to communicate you will reach him with the very first attempt. For example, if your party is on travel, the presence service will use his mobile number to establish a connection - you don’t need to phone several numbers (office, mobile etc.) to reach him.

Presence Service Integration

The first thing that comes to mind that can be integrated with a presence service is 3rd party communication tools. When you set your status in the Presence service, you may want to expose this information to IM, Skype and other communication tools you use. While advanced vendors have already integrated their presence service with communication software and provide API to perform this integration, you can integrate your presence service with communication tools and other enterprise software with some assistance of a specialized software development company.

Presence Service Vendors

• 3Com Presence Module by 3Com
• Avaya Aura Presence Services by Avaya
• Cisco Unified Presence by Cisco
• Alcatel-Lucent Presence Server by Alcatel-Lucent
• Indigo Presence Server by Indigo
• IPFX Presence by IPFX

What to Do Next

The presence service facilitates communications between your employees. Try to figure out the time you waste on failed attempts to reach your colleagues and apply it to the size of your company. Is it worth it to save that time with a presence service?

Read the next chapter: 9. Attendant Console - Manage and Dispatch Your Incoming Calls Effectively

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