Call Forward the Main Business number

[esoare]

How Can a customer Call Forward their main business number to a company cell phone after hours... They also want to Call Forward during the day some times, so the "Closed Business" strategy wont work.
Can this be done?
They want the main number forwarding to the Business Cell Phone, and voicemails to stay on the business cell phone when the call forwarding is happening.

They think the service isn't working right, because I have to setup the call ringing to 50 seconds, and their customers are hanging up before voicemail answers during the day...

[Baze]

Hi there!  I'm not sure if our answer is 100% correct as it may depend on whether you are hosted or not, but the way we do this is by:

1. Setting up the cell phone as a device.
2. Disabling the "confirm call" feature so that voicemail is handled by the cellphone rather than being pulled back to 2600hz
3. Send calls to the cell phone device after hours.
4. Go into the advanced callflow application, and create a new call flow using the "time conditions" callflow widgets and you can set a code to override the time condition.  This way, if you dial the code, it will override the business hours and the calls will forward to the cell phone even during the day.  
5. to really get fancy, you could then even set this as a shortcut on your phone (assuming you have extra buttons) so that you can just have a button on the phone to press to toggle back and forth.

Hope that is helpful!

[esoare]

ok. I use hosted.

So I have Saturday programmed as Closed, which would make the System use "After Hours" Incoming Call Handling for Saturday.

Would I then create the Enable Time of Day and pick Main Saturday?
Would I then create the Disable Time of Day and pick Main Saturday?
Thereby cancelling that, and the system would go back to normal?

Would the Enable Time of Day go across multiple days? i/e they are closed for a Monday Holiday, they Enable Time of Day with Main Saturday on FRIDAY the system is overiding all the way till Tuesday, when they Disable Time of Day with Main Saturday on TUESDAY?

I will test it out now before deployment, but the sooner I get them fixed up, the better!
Thanks for sharing!
es

[esoare]

Baze,

During Testing and the message I heard, I decided to setup up the CallFlows this way.

Closed


Open


That works.

But.
It Goes to the Voicemail on the Business Side, instead of doing "true" call forwarding, and letting the calling party go to the cell phone voicemail.


I tried the Device directly, instead of a User (I thought the User extended ringing might help), but the system consistently uses the 20 seconds, and forwards to the voicemail...

1: Can I extend the calling seconds on the After Hours Incoming Call Handling?
2: Can I send it off to a device, and not have the system do Next Action to a Voicemail box?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
es

[Karl Stallknecht]

Wow, I learn something new every day! Thanks for explaining this Baze! I had no idea we could let clients enable/disable this by themselves without logging into the UI.

Now the only other thing that would be helpful and help mimic an analog system would be a way to setup a BLF key so that it could light up to show that the system was in "night mode" like a standard PBX will let you do so that the receptionist will see it when he/she comes in every morning as a reminder to take the system off of night mode.

[Baze]

No problem!  I totally forgot to respond to the follow up it looks like. Just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if you could combine the manual presence to make that work?  Probably not because there isn't a toggle, but I bet you could do it with pivot and some code at least!

[Baze]

es: I think those things are possible:
1. go into the advanced callflow, and click on the device in your callflow that is being forwarded to:


2. Yes, you can send it off to a device, but you need to make sure that you have "require key press" DISABLED.  Otherwise it will just time out:

[Darren Schreiber]

I just wanted to reply to this, even though I know the thread is a bit old.

Karl asked:
"Now the only other thing that would be helpful and help mimic an analog system would be a way to setup a BLF key so that it could light up to show that the system was in "night mode" like a standard PBX will let you do so that the receptionist will see it when he/she comes in every morning as a reminder to take the system off of night mode."

I believe there is a way to do this. I'm checking on it, but we did code this at one point.

[Karl Stallknecht]

That would be awesome Darren! Thanks!

[Darren Schreiber]

So I spoke with engineering and it's not tied to the time-of-day unfortunately. However, they stated that when it was built the idea was:

1) Create a callflow for "activating Time-of-Day" with a Manual Presence element that turns on a light and then goes to the Enable Time-of-Day. You can set the presence name to anything you want (say, "tod_night")
2) Create a callflow for "disabling Time-of-Day" with a Manual Presence element that turns off the light and then goes to the Disable Time-of-Day. You can set the presence name to the same thing as #1
3) Set the phone to subscribe a light to the time-of-day name

The only catch with the above is you can't make it so pushing the button dials the correct enable/disable sequence I don't think.

This would result in the desired behavior most likely.

[Karl Stallknecht]

Just to clarify are you saying that you would need two separate buttons to enable/disable? I guess I don't understand the "catch" you mentioned based on the explanation above. And is this available now?

[Michael D]

Coincidentally, I am trying to figure this out as well. This solution kills a great deal of Time of day holiday routing /call flows for us

[Darren Schreiber]

Yes, same as the graphics posted above. You have a callflow for enable and a callflow for disable. They consist of:

Callflow 1: Manual Presence On -> Enable Time-Of-Day
Callflow 2: Manual Presence Off -> Disable Time-Of-Day

You program those into two keys on the phone. On a third key, you monitor the presence of the light.

It might be possible to do it all on one button/light but I don't think so.

[brandonb@persephone.io]

Yeah, this is one we've dealt with for some time.  A toggle would be ideal, but it seems like maybe since there are technically three states (time based, forced on, forced off), the toggle doesn't work?  Maybe a pivot would be a good temp solution until someone can do a pull request or get updated, but an easy subscribe to BLF for this with a toggle would be great.  A lot of times what we do is just build a custom menu with a custom voice recording "Hi, welcome to the acme inc call controller.  Press one to turn your phones off, press two to turn on holidays, press three to reset them, blah, blah".  

[Karl Stallknecht]

Got it, this makes perfect sense. Not perfect but I think it will do the trick for most clients. It just uses up a lot of BLF keys which I guess is the only downside. But we could just set a super easy call flow extension and tell them to remember it if they want to save the two keys.

[Karl Stallknecht]

Thanks Darren!

[brandonb@persephone.io]

Hey Darren - so we were poking around at system media and came across the temporal-menu.wav file which seems to solve our problem here (assuming we could activate!).  It is tied to the cf_temporal_route document.  Here is the text of the recording:

"To mark the office as open, press 1. To mark the office as closed, press 2. To resume normal operation, press 3."

I can't seem to find where this is mapped or how to access, but the code seems to be built out here?  Maybe we just need to create the button and link?

[Baze]

Just following up here.  We ended up writing a pivot function with ruby to do this which worked out pretty well.  Basically just toggles back and forth, but we also chained BLF and TTS so that you can program a button on your phone for this.  When you hit the button it checks the time, enables or disables based on the current state, and then lights the BLF up for all phones subscribing.  We use TTS to simply state enabled or disabled as a further confirmation.

We wrote it so that the Pivot string includes the temporal ID as well as an ID to set for BLF, therefore making fairly easy to extend to any clients or situations.  Here is the logic for anyone if it helps!  Good to know it is possible - well, that's the great thing: Anything is possible with kazoo. ;)

def toggle_time      if params[:timeset] && params['AccountSid'] && params[:presence_id]        puts params[:timeset]        puts params['AccountSid']        require 'company/company'        new_state = company.new.toggle_time_condition(params['AccountSid'], params[:timeset])          case new_state        when 'enabled'          status = "busy"          text   = "enabled"        else          status = "idle"          text   = "disabled"        end          flow = {          module: "manual_presence",          data: {            presence_id: params[:presence_id],            status: status          },          children: {            _: {              module: "tts",              data: {                text: text              }            }          }        }          render json:flow, content_type: 'application/json', status: 200      else        render nothing: true, status: 404      end    end

[Pramod Venugopal]

Just following up on Brandon's comment. 

The pivot server makes an API call to retrieve the current state of the time condition and then sets the toggle on and off. It can be used to toggle all 3 states if needed ( Forced On, Forced Off and Based on Time)