Ring Groups, Follow-Me and Voicemail

General Help
1

We have a ring group that includes 4 individuals’ extensions (suffixed with #), with the Ring Strategy “ringall”. On occasion that the office is closed but their support staff works from home, the 1-2 people who are on-call will enable their Follow-Me settings to go to their cell phones.

2 Questions:

  1. If a call comes into the ring group and there are 2 individuals with Follow-Me settings enabled, what happens with the call?

  2. And following question #2, what if the individual doesn’t pick up their cell (or are on another call) and their cell phone’s voicemail picks up - is that considered an “answer”? Will the inbound caller leave a voicemail there or be pushed back into the ring group?

2

Coin Toss. Both cell phones will ring until one of them answers. A lot depends on how the call is answered, though. Once the system gets notified that the call is answered (which may or may not be by someone actually answering the call) the call at the PBX is no longer under the control of the ring-group. To give you an idea of how this can go, some phones immediately answer the call and process the rest of the interaction locally. If you hit a phone that has FAX detection enabled (as another example), the phone will immediately answer the call (to detect the FAX) and then route the call accordingly.

So - coin toss.

Yup.

Once the call is answered, the call in the ring group is answered and the ring group is no longer part of the call. If voicemail picks up the call, the user’s personal voicemail will be used, and you get no more visibility into the call.

3

Thank you so much for the explanation. Basically you confirmed my suspicions, haha. I think we’ll want to design this flow differently.

1 Like
4

You can certainly enable “confirm calls” on the extension’s follw-me settings, preventing the cell phone voicemail from capturing the caller.

1 Like
5

Just a thought, you could try softphones on the mobiles.

6

Not sure which area you are, but wireless data on mobiles in most areas are not very stable.
Call quality will probably be like WhatsApp calls. when on wifi it’s much better…

7

Yah, a lot would depend on your area.

I’ve used it in the past for work with very little issues, only stopped because I had to close the firewall hole. It was never intended for super important calls either, so guess it would also depend on the use case.

Been using it between my kid and I (she’s 4 I ain’t paying for phone service). Have not had any big issues, just added video on it doesn’t seem to be too bad.

8

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