FreePBX Softphone: 5 Incredibly Useful Features for Call Centers

FreePBX is the most popular office PBX in the world. According to its developers, it has reached several million installations across 220 countries. It offers a huge number of features. Some work automatically; others still need someone at the controls. That’s where Softphone.Pro comes in.

Agents can handle up to 300 calls a day, so the software they use needs to be as clear and convenient as possible. The easier it is to work with, the more calls an agent can handle efficiently.

Softphone.Pro was designed with exactly that in mind:

• Large buttons. They remain easy to see at any screen resolution. And if the interface still feels too small, you can simply enlarge the window using the zoom feature.
• Common actions take just two clicks: call transfer, conference, redial, and so on.
• Customizable interface. Unnecessary windows can be closed. If an agent spends most of the day working in a CRM, the main softphone window can be hidden during a call, leaving only a compact call window that takes up very little screen space.

FreePBX also offers a number of features whose full potential is easier to unlock with Softphone.Pro.

1. Call transfer in a softphone: attended and blind

You can transfer an active call to a colleague. There are two types of call transfer:

• Blind transfer. The active call is immediately transferred to another employee.
• Attended transfer. The call is put on hold while you call the colleague first. This gives you a chance to speak to them before completing the transfer — for example, to pass along important information about the customer.

Softphone.Pro supports both options. You can read more about configuring call transfer for FreePBX in our article “Call transfer in FreePBX: how to set up and use”.

2. Conference calls with colleagues in a softphone

If an agent realizes they need help from a more experienced colleague or advice from a specialist in another department, they can turn the current call into a conference and add new participants to the conversation.

Our “Conference” article explains how to configure this feature.

3. Colleagues’ statuses in the softphone Contacts window (BLF)

If an agent needs to transfer a call or start a conference, it helps to know which colleagues are actually available. That saves the customer from unnecessary waiting. Softphone.Pro therefore shows colleagues’ current statuses directly in the Contacts window.

In other words, the softphone immediately shows who is available to take the call.

You can read more about configuring this feature here: “Contact presence indication (BLF)”.

4. Listening and whispering in FreePBX

FreePBX has a feature that works particularly well with Softphone.Pro: ChanSpy. It lets a supervisor listen to an agent’s conversation with a customer in real time and join the call if necessary. This is useful not only for training new agents, but also for stepping in before a difficult customer conversation turns into a full-blown conflict.

To use it, simply sign in to your Softphone.Pro Team account, open the agent monitoring panel, and connect to the agent you need.

For detailed setup instructions, see “How to set up ChanSpy on FreePBX”.

5. How an agent’s softphone status affects call queues in FreePBX

FreePBX has another useful feature: incoming call queues. Used properly, they can make customer service much more efficient.

Here’s how it works:

When a customer calls the company, they hear a recorded menu. For example: “You’ve reached Auto Show 2000. For Sales, press 1; for Service, press 2…” After choosing a department, the customer enters a queue and hears hold music. FreePBX then calls available agents in a predefined order. If someone answers, the PBX takes the customer out of the queue and connects the call. If no one answers within the specified time, FreePBX moves on to the next agent, and so on down the list.

The problem starts when an agent is busy with after-call work — or simply away from the desk — while the PBX still considers them available. FreePBX keeps trying to ring that agent. Unfortunately, this happens more often than anyone would like.

After-call work usually takes one to five minutes. An agent may also step away for a smoke break, lunch, or something else. Ideally, they should either close the softphone or send the appropriate FreePBX DTMF command to leave the queue. But human nature being what it is, people sometimes forget.

And that small oversight has a very practical consequence: the PBX keeps calling unavailable agents, while the customer waits longer and longer for an answer. Chances are, they will eventually hang up and call a competitor instead.

Call center metrics suffer too: response times increase and so does the number of abandoned calls. Read more in our article “How ACW status improves Average Speed of Answer (ASA)”.

Softphone.Pro can help solve these problems:

• Open Settings — Interface.
• Enable Show after-call work window and select the Busy status. You can also configure a dedicated After Call Work status.
• Make sure Change status to Away when no activity is detected and Change status to Online when activity is detected are enabled.

You can find more information about these settings in our Knowledge Base.

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