Hot Desking Overview

Hot desking lets an authorized extension user borrow a shared desk phone for a while by signing in with their extension number and voicemail PIN. Once signed in, they place and receive calls as themselves, under their own extension and caller ID, rather than as whoever used the phone before them.

Where hot desking helps

Hot desking suits any workplace where a phone is shared rather than permanently assigned: hot-desk offices, field crews who drop in between site visits, and contact centers running rotating shifts.

Consider a call center that operates around the clock. Agents rotate across shifts, so several people may use the same handset over the course of a day. Each agent signs in at the start of their shift and takes queue calls under their own extension. When they sign out at the end of the shift, Cloud Voice removes them from their queues automatically, so incoming calls are never left ringing at an unattended phone. The payoff is fewer idle handsets and better use of the hardware you already have.

What you need

• Desk phone: an IP phone whose model and firmware are supported for auto provisioning. See Auto Provisioning - Supported Devices.
• Phone system: hot desking must be enabled on your Cloud Voice platform, which IZT keeps current on your behalf.

Note

Auto provisioning is how the phone system pushes settings to a supported handset automatically, instead of you typing them in by hand on the phone. The desk phone must be a model that supports it, otherwise hot desking sign-in will not work.

Set it up

Getting hot desking running takes two configuration steps in the phone system portal:

1. Provision the shared phone. Configure the handset through auto provisioning so it is ready to accept sign-ins. See Set up a Hot Desking Phone.
2. Enable hot desking per user. Turn the feature on for each extension that should be allowed to use a shared phone. Only users who have hot desking enabled can sign in. See Enable Hot Desking for an Extension User.

Signing in and out

Once a shared phone is ready, an authorized user can sign in (Guest In) and sign out (Guest Out) in either of two ways.

Note

To sign in, a user needs two things: their own extension number and their voicemail PIN (the same PIN they use to check their voicemail box). Sign-in only works for extensions that have hot desking enabled in the setup step above.

Caution

Always sign out (Guest Out) before walking away from a shared phone. Until the user signs out, the handset keeps their extension, caller ID, and queue membership, so anyone who picks it up next would place and receive calls under that user’s identity, and the user’s queue calls would keep ringing at a phone they have left.

Dial a feature code

Users dial a short code on the shared phone to sign in with their extension, then dial another to sign out when they are finished. The default codes are:

• Guest In: *84
• Guest Out: *084

Tip

You can change these codes, or enable and disable them, under Call Features > Feature Code > Hot Desking in the phone system portal.

For the full procedure, see dial a feature code to sign in and dial a feature code to sign out.

Press a BLF key

A BLF (Busy Lamp Field) key is a programmable button on the desk phone, the kind normally used to watch another extension’s status. Cloud Voice automatically assigns a Guest In key and a Guest Out key on every hot desking phone. Users press the Guest In key to sign in with their own extension and the Guest Out key to sign out afterward.

For the full procedure, see press a BLF key to sign in and press a BLF key to sign out.