Transfer from POTS to VOIP

If I set up an Asterisk system with both POTS and VOIP trunks, would it be possible to have the incoming calls over the POTS lines to be immediately transferred to a VOIP line? This way, I can have one “reliable” POTS line number that is always free and use the multiple VOIP lines.

No

What Rusty should have said is that yes you can transfer the call but the PSTN line will continue to be busy during the length of the call.

Thanks rusty/hematite… so if I wanted to have a customer service line which could possibly have 10 or 20 people on queue, and wanted the reliability of POTS, I would have to get 20 POTS lines? I know this has drifted off the topic… What is the general rule of thumb when trying to set something like this up so that I can have people waiting in queue, and not ever get a busy signal.

Depending where you are you may want to look at getting a Pri that would give you 23 lines

voip-info.org/wiki/view/PRI

Disclamer: I have never done this so take any advice with this in mind.

As a general rule of thumb is to have at least n+1 lines more than your max number of calls. Which would mean if you want to have 20 people in the queue you would need to have 21 lines. Next you need to think about how many CS reps you have taking calls. Lets say you have 5 of them. Which means 5 active calls, 20 calls in the queue and 1 open line for a total of 26 lines.

So let use a bit of logic to try to figure out what we should be doing.

If you have a max of 10 lines and when you check your records for your call volume to see when you are maxing that number out more than half of the time you might want to change to having 15 lines (an increase of 50%). Then keep track of your load and continue to increase the number of lines until you have reached a stable amount and still have a few extra lines which are never used.

I would then also check any records to find a pattern of increase over time so that could be used to dertermine how many lines to add.

You have X number of reps taking calls, you want to be able to support at least 20 people in a queue and you do not want to have the next person who calls receive a busy signal. So if we say that you need to have X + 20 + Y == Z for the number of lines you need.

Finding the value of ‘Y’ will require the use of ‘black magic’ (meaning someone who has a better idea of call center patterns then what I have).