Hello all,
I am sure there must be a simple answer to my question, but i just can’t seem to find it.
I have setup a digital receptionist, but i only want it to kick in when my receptionist is unavailable. So basically when someone calls the office my receptionist will take the call, but if she is not there i want the call to be handled by the IVR. Could someone please provide some info on this. Thanks
Curtis
Thanks for the quick reply, i will try to the steup the way you suggested.
Set up an inbound route and have it go to a ring group. Put your receptionist extension(s) in the ring group extension list. Make the destination if no answer the IVR, and set a reasonable ring time (so if no one answers in a certain number of seconds, it will go to the IVR). Make sure the receptionist’s phone AND extension does not have any type of call forwarding enabled, especially call forwarding on busy (unless you know what you are doing). You may want to install the unsupported Feature Panel module to check the status of call forwarding on the extension, but remember that the device itself may also be doing forwarding, so you may have to check it both places (again, call forwarding busy, especially when enabled at the endpoint device, is the most likely to give you trouble).
That’s about as much as I can suggest without doing some additional testing. You would either need to use a time condition (which I’ve never really used, so can’t tell you much about them) or a way to de-register the receptionist’s phone when not available (which could be as simple as unplugging the phone from the 'net connection, or disconnecting the power, though there should be a more elegant way to do it than that). If none of the extensions in the ring group are available then I would assume it will fall through to the IVR. A time condition would be more appropriate if you know that someone will always be available to answer the receptionist phone during business hours, whereas registration/de-registration would probably work best if there are occasionally times during business hours when the phones aren’t covered. As I say, this is just a thought off the top of my head, a place to begin as it were, and not necessarily the complete answer.