Multiple extensions on the 3CX softphone, how do I do it?

[checkinyyz]

We switched to 3CX from our Avaya, and a bunch of our users have 2 and 3 extensions for different roles. All 3 need to show up as lines in the 3CX phone, so they can pick any line to dial out, but also receive inbound calls on any of the extensions, each with their own voicemail. Not sure how to do this; how do I have 2 or 3 extensions on one softphone? Do I need to use Bria or something 3rd party or can 3CX do this?

 

[VoIPTools]

Unless someone else knows how to do this, my answer is it cannot be done. We used to be able to do this in earlier versions of 3CX Phone, but can't anymore. I really miss that feature because I perform a lot of testing on multiple 3CX servers simultaneously and this forces me to kill my production phone while I perform tests against a test server

 

[checkinyyz]

Darn that's too bad. Yeah we have 2 departments in our company, but some employees assist with both of them. I think I could use Bria instead as I believe it supports multiple SIP extensions. Just more of a pain!

 

[VoIPTools]

One of the challenges we face as technology implementers is getting people to rethink old processes when new technology is available. Maybe there are other ways to handle this. Why do you need two extensions? My assumption is that you need to answer the phone differently depending on which department the customer is contacting? You can prepend the name of the queue, ring group, or inbound rule to the caller ID and that would resolve how to answer the phone? What other reasons do you have for "needing" multiple extensions assigned to the same person? Maybe we can improve your business processes rather than trying to recreate an outdated approach?

 

[checkinyyz]

We have 2 separate companies, they do completely different things. Each employee supports both companies, so they need 2 identities.

One employee needs 2 extensions, and 2 DIDs, with 2 voicemail boxes that say 2 different greetings, like one says "Thanks for calling ABC Company" the other says "Thanks for calling XYZ Company". So simply seeing a different caller ID doesn't work, the voicemail boxes it goes to when the call isn't answered has to be different as the 2 companies aren't related.

There has to be 2 separate voicemail boxes depending on the extension dialed, that's the #1 requirement. A customer calling John Smith on his primary extension must never hear the voicemail greeting for his secondary extension, and vice versa. To the customer it absolutely must appear that they are calling a different company.

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

You could post your idea on https://www.3cx.com/community/forums/3cx-ideas/ . All posts are reviewed by their corresponding Departments and, if feasible and voted for by other users as well, may be implemented in an upcoming service pack or update.

 

[VoIPTools]

I think you have a good argument for two extensions. While I think there are still approaches we could take to get your customer down to one extension. For example, do you really need to state the company name in the voicemail greeting? And for outbound caller ID, you could setup outbound rules going to multiple trunks that have unique caller IDs, or use our 3CX Caller ID add-on to change the person's caller ID with each call. For direct inbound calls, you can prepend the inbound rule name to the caller ID and then direct both DIDs to the single extension. I think we can address all the issues, but the fact remains that two extensions on the soft phone would be the cleanest / easiest solution. You could convert to hard phones with multiple accounts configured too.... but that's obviously still a compromise solution.