The first small offices are running on Pidgin Talk: about ten phones each, and no advanced features.
Pidgin Talk has left the bench. It is now answering phones for businesses with simple needs: around ten phones, calls in, calls out, hold and transfer.
The whole feature list
That really is all of it. No menus, no voicemail, no queues. For these offices it is enough: the phone rings, someone picks up, and now and then a call is passed to the back room.
What they were paying before, for a long list of features they never touched, was not.
What going live changes
On the bench, a bug is a note in a list. In an office it is someone who could not call their supplier. That changes how we work:
- Every change is tested with real calls before it goes anywhere near a customer.
- Updates to the web pages happen during the day, because they no longer touch calls. Updates to the call service wait for a quiet hour.
- The log gets read every morning, whether or not anyone complained.
What we are watching
Three things worry us more than anything else: calls that connect without sound, incoming calls that stop arriving, and phones that quietly drop off. Each of those looks fine from the server and is a disaster at the front desk.
What the offices asked for first
Not much, and nearly the same from each: "can it take a message?" and "can it say we are closed?" Voicemail and a greeting. So that is what comes next.