Desired call flow -> Person A -> If A doesnt take the call -> Reception -> Person A voicemail

FreePBX Tips and Tricks
1

The call flow I am trying to achieve is:

  1. Suppose Alice (A client) calls John (An employee) at extension 8003. It should ring the SIP phone on the extension 8003 and if the phone is not picked up it should ring the phones defined in the “follow me list” using the strategy defined in the “Ring strategy”
  2. In case John does not pick up any of the phones defined in the “follow me list” the call should go to Betty (the receptionist).
  3. Betty (receptionist) should be able to answer the call saying “You have reached Johns desk how can I help you”
  4. Betty should be able to transfer the call from Alice directly to Johns voice mail if Alice wants to talk specifically to John and not to one of John’s colleagues.

I can achieve 80% of the above ring strategy by doing the following:

  1. I have defined 8003 as John’s extension
  2. I have defined 7003 as John’s “direct to voicemail” extension.
  3. For 8003 I have the set “Destination if no answer:” to Betty’s extension 8007
  4. Betty transfers the call to 7003 if Alice insists on talking only to John.
  5. On extension 7003 I have set the “Ring time” to 1.

My questions are:

  1. Can I achieve the same objectives without having to define two extensions for John (8003 and 7003)?
  2. How can Betty (the receptionist) know on her LCD screen of Polycom 650 as to who was Alice calling. So that she can answer the call saying “You have reached Person X desk how can I help you” ? Currently Alice sees on her phone line “From: xxx-xxx-xxxx” What I would like to see is: "From xxx-xxx-xxxx For: 8003 "

If you have questions please feel free to ask and I will elaborate more on the call flow that I am trying to achieve.

I am wondering how can I achieve the above call flow with freepbx ?

Thanks for your time.

2

While you can put it in the Inbound Route as Bill suggested, if the extension has a Follow-Me, or if you are originally sending the calls to a Ring Group, it might be more appropriate to place it there (since an Inbound Route may well got to more than one extension through an IVR or whatever). All those pages have a field labeled “CID Name Prefix:” - if you put the original party’s initials, or their extension number in there your receptionist should see it on her Caller ID display. If you rather have a visual popup on her computer, this page may help, depending on the OS running on her computer (now that there is Growl for Windows this works on Windows boxes too):

How to set up notification (Caller ID popup) on Mac OS X, Linux and other systems

P.S. How about editing your earlier messages to remove the spam line at the bottom? That might get you banned if a moderator notices!

3

*8003 goes to VM
as for the other I do not know how / if that could be done via the GUI

4

Wow !! *8003 works wonders. Now I do not need to create two extensions for each user. This will keep the system so much more manageable.

I have done some Asterisk programming.

Any hints on what I would need to do to tell the receptionist who receives the call in case of no answer who the call was originally meant for,

I am thinking of using “Custom app” as the option under “Destination if no answer”

Thanks,

5

If you’re using DIDS, place an appropriate entry in the “CID name” name block in inbound routes.

Bill/W5WAF