I’d like some help on forwarding certain calls when unanswered.
Specifically my company has an IVR set up and when calls from the IVR are passed on to an extension, these calls are forwarded to a ring group when unanswered.
The problem is when there’s a call from another extension these calls end up also being forwarded to the ring group (secretarial staff).
Is there a way to have the calls from another extension not forwarded?
Doing exactly what you are asking would require custom dialplan code.
However, would one of these work for you?
If the user’s phone has a spare line button, give him two extensions: one which internal users call (with no forwarding); the IVR option routes to the other (with forwarding to ring group).
Or, set up the phone with no forwarding, but have the IVR route to a ring group with only one member (the user’s extension), a suitable ring time, with failover to the receptionist ring group.
Thanks for the ideas, I have tried the second line but that caused havoc with the secretarial pool since they would have to have two BLF buttons to see if the person is actually talking.
Your second suggestion is probably the best solution for us, and I did try it, but I have one question:
When adding a Ring Group for the extension, the Ring Time option isn’t correct (seconds wise); i.e. we prefer to have the phone ring 4-5 times at the extension which should be around 6-7 seconds, but with those variables the phone rings only 2-3 times, I did manage to find a sweet spot at around 15 seconds in the Ring Time field but I’m not sure if that’s going to cause a problem with something else!
Just read on all the Ring Time problems out there… my installation is very basic with a i5 PC dedicated and no virtualization. Also most phones are Yealinks with a few Panasonic and Grandstream units.
Stewart1’s second solution with a ring group for every user did the trick! I did have to guesstimate the correct time for 5-6 rings (15 secs in the Ring Time field), but other than that everything works perfectly.