vnend@princeton.edu (D. W. James) (02/23/91)
Greetings! I work in a customer support center here at Princeton,
staffed during business hours, some evenings and some weekends. We
have a rather complicated combination of factors that add up to a need
for an answering machine with the following features:
Outgoing message of variable length, set by us.
We need to inform users calling after hours what to do in
a large number of circumstances, so length should be fairly
long. Definately greater than your usual 40 seconds. Also,
since our schedule changes from time to time, we need something
that is not too difficult to change the message on.
No incoming message.
This is just for announcements.
Adjustable ringer pickup.
We need to be able to set it long enough that customers
trying to reach us during business hours can be answered
even though it may take us more than 3 rings. At the same
time, we don't want it so long that everyone gets tired of
listening to the ringing and hang up before the message
machine picks up. We guess that this means a number between
seven and ten rings, but we will need to experiment to find
out what the best number is.
And, being a university means we would like to find it for as little
as possible.
I realize that there are cards for PC's that do most/all of
this, but for other reasons (cost and security mostly) we would like
to just get a separate unit.
I'll summarize any mail sent, in the event that it is
substantially different from what gets posted. I'll also post a
follow-up article on what we decide. Thanks, one and all.
David W. James Information Centers,
CIT Information Systems, Princeton University
vnend@princeton.edu, vnend@pucc.bitnet, or {backbone}!princeton!nudity!vnend