Manuel Breschi

Hi Gary,
you could associate different Schedules to different numbers and use the Routing feature.
This way you can plan your daily routing in advance just once, based on the traffic fluctuations you are experiencing. You can give it a try and see if your customers get a fairer expectation in terms of time to wait.
Manuel

mbreschi@zendesk.com

Thank you for your feedback.
We are looking at the possibility to decrease the time to answer the calls for Enterprise Edition. I understand this does not answer your specific requirement, but it can alleviate your issues.
Additionally, in the future, we could consider open APIs for the call answer so that an eventual "auto answer" could be simply scripted on your side, where needed.
Best regards,
Manuel

mbreschi@zendesk.com

Hi Gary,
thanks for your feedback - definitely taken into account for the future, but there's no plan at the moment to change this.
As a temporary work-around with the current set-up you could potentially allocate different numbers on different times of the day, if possible, so that a more precise estimation would be offered to your customers. This of course depends on the numbers availability and how your customers get access to them. Happy to discuss further as needed.
Best regards,
Manuel

mbreschi@zendesk.com