Caller ID Prepend for Outgoing Calls

[Karl Stallknecht]

A potential customer is currently using Ring Central and wanted to know if we have this ability: they said that Ring Central has the ability to prepend digits before or after the caller ID when a call is forwarded from their office to an external number.

The idea is that a customer calls the office and presses the extension for employee A. Employee A has a call flow that rings their desk phone for 10 seconds and then rings their cell phone for 10 seconds. Employee A wants to know that it is a forwarded call though if they get it on their cell phone, so the cell phone shows "0(xxx)xxx-xxxx" and the employee can answer the phone differently.

Currently the only two ways I know of right now to tell someone that it is a forwarded call are:

a) Set the external device settings to not pass through caller ID, so the caller ID shows the office number - the problem with this is that the customer can't look at their cell phone call log to get the caller ID of the caller. Plus, then the employee might think another employee from the office is calling.

or

b) Set the external device settings to "press 1 to confirm pickup" - the problem with this is that you don't know until you have already answered and it also slows down the answer time, so you have to add more rings in order to allow time for the employee to listen to the prompt and then press 1.

As for as I know, no other method exists. If it does though I'd love to know about it! And if it doesn't, are you able to add this caller ID prepend method? I tried setting up a call flow to prepend the caller ID before the call goes to an external landline type device, but it didn't work. The prepend feature only appears to work with SIP devices.

[Anthony Goss]

Caller ID prepend option, for me, is available in monster smart pbx and adv provisioner.  Unfortunately it does not work.  I have a potential retail client that want to go with us but they can not have inbound caller ID.  Weird.  So I was planning to use Prepend to hopefully add enough characters to push the caller ID off screen. Like "Incoming Call Blah Blah"

[Karl Stallknecht]

Out of curiosity is this so that their employees can't stalk customers or something? haha

Smart idea though, I like it. In Kazoo caller ID prepend works fine for us, as long as we are using SIP devices with it.

2600hz: is there a way to disable incoming caller ID? I can see how this would be useful with certain customers. I know you can disable incoming CNAM dips, but I'm not sure about the number portion.