We don’t want calls from outside our service area - area codes 312 & 630, I am not a fan of the solutions that put these calls in endless loops or otherwise abuses the caller. We subscribe to a service that transcribes our vmail to text in an email. My solution is to send all calls from our primary service area to the normal queue, then send all other calls to the v2email service.
I spent five hours trying to figure out how to make wildcards in Incoming Routes work, I hope this note helps someone.
Good area codes: 312 & 630
My phone #: 3126651242
Need 3 Incoming routes:
DID Number: +13126651242
Caller ID Number: _+1630NXXXXXX
Destination: Ring group 600
DID Number: +13126651242
Caller ID Number: _+1312NXXXXXX
Destination: Ring group 600
DID Number: (Blank)
Caller ID Number: (Blank)
Destination: Voice Mail
If this doesn’t work for you, look at your call reports menu to see how the incoming call is being presented to your switch, it may be that your carrier is not presenting a “+1” in front of the inbound callerID.
The nice thing about this solution is that you don’t loose any customer calls, some may go to vmail - when vmail is converted to email you can quickly skim the message and call the customer back.
Hope this helps someone and that everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving and Blessed Christmas.