Don't mistake people not being willing to waste their time fighting someone. Any CTO who found out you don't have this feature ahead of time would just buy a different phone.
I'm not sure which is more bizarre: that you seem to believe that only five people need to pause during dialing, or that you don't already know that this is a feature that has been built into all telephones -- including $10 consumer phones -- for over 20 years. Nevertheless, I'll explain the business case for why you need to add pauses:
BACKGROUND: A revolutionary new technology in the world of telephony and customer service is something called "Interactive Voice Recording," or IVR. With an IVR, your customers can follow a convenient voice menu and be automatically directed to the correct department within your organization -- no operator needed!
Another key technology that is gaining popularity in the world of phone calling is passwords. Passwords are an everyday fact of life; you may have even come across passwords yourself! Common applications for telephone passwords include verifying the rights to access a program (e.g. webinar administrators), ID'ing a user amidst a crowd of voices in a (e.g. phone conference), and protection of sensitive materials (e.g. voicemail inbox).
USE SCENARIO: For these business-friendly technologies to work, all your employees need is a touch tone phone and a couple extra minutes of their time. After dialing their intended number, the staffer will hear brief voice instructions, followed by an opportunity to enter in the IVR response, password information, or personal identifier code. Many modern phones have what we in the industry call "speed dial," where you can store the appropriate number inside of your telephone. Say goodbye to those cumbersome 10-digit numbers; your end user will connect to his or her voicemail, phone conference, or webinar with a single touch of the button!
USER BASE: 450,000 WebEx meetings per day across 231 different countries. Assuming at least two people on the phone, that's 104 individual phones making a call every second. All of which require a conference ID, and a choice to identify the user or enter the room as a guest And that's just one of several vendors, not including GoToMeeting, FreeConferenceCall.com, or Level3 Communications. All of these would be programmable if the speed dial could include pauses, and IT teams would be able to onboard new employees without them ever knowing their unique ID for the company conference line. Only other option is that they remember a long random number that has to be communicated and administrated for every staffer. As for passwords, it's probably just about every phone user on the planet, but many of these have the ability to disable password when calling from the home handset. Still, these prompts are predictable enough to pre-program the responses.
COMMON UX IMPLEMENTATIONS:
- Standard phones: press and hold the star/hash/0 button for 1.5 seconds to add a 1/2/4 second pause character instead of the original key.
- IP phones: add a special character (e.g. a semicolon) in the record to represent a half-second pause during the dial.
- Really fancy phones: Audio recognition software, programmable to listen to the IVR, and fire the tone response when there's a second-long pause in the voice prompt.
BUSINESS VALUE:
- Less downtime from employees searching through old emails to find the random password and user ID that they can never remember.
- Fewer calls to IT for lost passwords, instructions for starting a conference call as the organizer, or user error keeping some from being able to join.
- Onboard new employees, giving them a hotkey for access to the company conference line, without ever telling them their user ID, call number, or password
- Less training for existing employees to figure out how to use their phone conferencing software.
- Less downtime from employees searching through old emails to find the random password and user ID that they can never remember.
- No need to replace our Polycom handsets because they lack an obviously needed feature