Second life of Busy Lamp Fields
Krzysztof Burzyński, Jan. 22nd, 2021.
Automatic BLF lamps - so-called Busy Line Fields - are traditionally associated with reception desks of large corporations, equipped with panels of several dozen buttons, enabling direct connection with an extension number via just one click. However, the spread of digital VoIP telephony has made such features widely available, although they are still not very well known or widely used.
Why a second life? Rapid deployment of remote work and home office brings new problems. Working in a dispersed team, we no longer can hear our colleagues' phone calls. Well, we often don't even know if a particular person is working on a specific day. If our colleagues took a VoIP phone home with them (and, of course, they are not attached to their smartphones only), the busy lights will show us who is talking at the very moment. One glance at the phone panel allows you to quickly evaluate dynamics of the team's activities.
If our focus is customer service and we care about the satisfaction level, then the lamps allow us to shorten the customer's connection waiting time. You can always pick up an incoming call on a colleague's phone when the light flashes for too long. Even though you both workorks in completely different cities!
BLF lamps perform a slightly different function than the typical status in messengers and chat application. The status must be individually set, i.e. it shows our intentions. The lamps give automatically a momentary picture of the situation and allow the team to react dynamically.
Modern BLF lamps are not only buttons on the panel of classic VoIP phones or reception sets. Similar functions are available in smartphone communication apps s well as in computer softphones. My favorite function are active entries in the application's phone book and call history, available from the application or softphone and illustrating not only the co-worker's phone contact data but also their actual status.
Take a look at the status lamps of your colleagues at work, maybe you are just losing the chance to talk to an important client!
K.B. 2021