Sarah Salvador

I'm still getting email updates on this post after I commented in agreement 3 years(!) ago. For those just joining now, community managers were responsive 3-4 years ago, but the response was always that simultaneous-ring style calling was not on any future roadmaps. Then, the responses from the Zendesk side on this comment stopped altogether. It's clear, to me at least, that this is not a priority for the Zendesk development team.

I made a comment back then that I, too, didn't do my homework when onboarding Zendesk, out of assumption that this sort of ring style was a standard on all business phone systems.

3 years later, we're moving on to a different suite that suits our workflow better and has a more aggressive roadmap that aligns with our needs.

@Stuart - I will admit that when we were considering Zendesk, I didn't properly vet Talk enough to discover that this wasn't possible, for the same reason you stated - it honestly never occurred to me that a feature like that wouldn't be available. We were more focused on the Support and Chat aspects of Zendesk, which we have implemented fully and use regularly with great success; but now I am unfortunately stuck in a place in which we are having to consider another move to an alternate system for all of our CRM needs because the Talk module is insufficient for our needs.

We also desperately need this functionality and I echo many of the specific needs of others who have commented. We're small team with many members who have multiple roles. The round-robin style of ringing simply does not work based on how we prioritize those that are on the primarily phone versus those that have other primary roles, with phone as a secondary role. We have a hard "no missed calls" rule in our call center, which means that anyone who is qualified to answer the phone is required to as needed if calls go unanswered. As someone commented above, this means that I and other managers who are on the phone less by nature, would be pinged first on incoming calls due to low-talk time. Even if we create concentric groups of members, we'd have to create so many in our organizational setup that I can't imagine a customer having the patience to wait through as many rings as it would take to reach finally an agent if it got to the management level.

Regarding the official response above, the ability to configure the 30-second wait time may help some, but it wouldn't help in our situation. In order to reduce the wait time to a total time that would prevent the end-user from hanging up, we'd likely have to reduce the wait time to a duration that would be moderately unreasonable for an agent to pick up the call.