Chris Ryland

The frustrating thing is that ZD Talk works so well in all other respects, so we're not really motivated to look for an alternate solution. It just needs to have a simultaneous-ring function and let us decide whether to use it or not.

I apologize for the frustration but there is reason for this. There is a best practice advisory for why we dont offer "hunt groups" where a single call rings multiple lines. This is a function of many older telephony systems and the reason behind the best practice of avoiding them is that it creates unequal work distribution on your team. For example. If John is a great agent and always picks up on the first ring then you may have agent Joe that will learn to only pick up on the 3rd or 4th ring because he knows John will pick up as soon as a call comes in. This can create agent burnout and a poor work environment. With Zendesk Talk we seek to avoid this and create agent accountability and transparency so that everyone gets an equal workload.

Why enforce a policy decision like this, instead of providing the machinery needed by the companies actually using ZD Talk. I.e., ZD could provide tools to see if in fact this situation is occurring, and then let the company in question deal with it at the policy-making level (or not).

Sigh, once again this is Zendesk telling us how we should run our company.

And, again, this assumes some huge support pool.

We have 4 people total on our team, 2 devs, 1 support and 1 dogsbody/founder (me). We're all willing to pitch in equally, but because of the round-robin ringing, we can't.

Again, this sure seems to indicate that ZD isn't really concerned with the smaller/medium-size business market. I think they're missing the boat here entirely.

I've already commented over a year ago, but I'll add once again that it looks like ZD is basically ignoring any businesses other than those with dedicated phone support personnel.

This doesn't bode well for ZD's long-term success.

Could we at least get some explanation from the product manager why this isn't being addressed?

It seems to me that ZD has no intention whatsoever of making a round-robin kind of Talk available, and that ruins ZD for most of us small businesses.

This is a major problem.

Althought we mostly love ZD for ticket handling (plenty of little annoyances as with any solution), it's pretty clear they have no intention of implementing simultaneous ringing (unlike every other VOIP solution out there), which makes them useless for most small businesses. That's a shame, as we'd love to consolidate our channels into ZD.

@jeff, @ryan:

When you say "round robin" I think you mean "simultaneous ringing", or at least your comments make the most sense, even if you don't mean that.

I.e., in a small company (like ours, 4 people, all "on deck" but also wearing many hats and often in and out or developing "in the zone" and thus essentially uninterruptable) we all need to see the phone ringing simultaneously, for there to be any chance of handling the call effectively.

Round-robin would take at least 1.5 minutes to get to the last person on the list, and that's unacceptable.

@Sarah: My thoughts exactly. Thank you.

Same as most folks commenting here. We're just 4 people working out of our home offices, 2 of whom are generally available and 2 of whom are backups. We all do support, but that's not any of our main functions. We just do it as part of our work as engineers (or in my case, as company head and thus general dogsbody).

Since we can't predict when any one of us will be around (our schedules are flexible), ringing round-robin won't work, since the phone might ring for up to 1.5 minutes without a response.

Every other phone system we've ever seen or tried (and we've tried several) can ring all phones simultaneously. I just don't understand why ZD talk can't do it. Seems like an anti-product.

Without simultaneous ringing, Talk is useless to us. Please add this feature!