Remote greeting change

[tlsallada]

With winter coming and snow here in Pennsylvania, I have a customer who has asked if they can change the greeting played by the auto attendant remotely on days they wish to stay closed. They have no phones 'off premises' so all extensions in the system are located ' in house'.
Can it be done remotely??

 

[leejor]

Anything is possible if you can get "into" 3CX remotely using something like VPN. A recording could be substituted, in the DR, or calls could be routed to a second DR that had the "closed due to inclement weather" recording. As far as something semi-automated, you might be able to make use of call forwarding though a dummy extension before the DR, and have a remote user change the destination from one DR to another. Most others make use of "fixed times" such as office and holiday hours.

 

[tlsallada]

I thought about having the customer prerecord a 'closed due to inclement weather' recording so I could remote into the system and change it. I was hoping there was a way that they could do it without involving our company to remote in. They don't have an employee that has any technical skills that I would trust to do it via VPN.
The old Executone system allowed them to get into voicemail via the telephone and record a message remotely. I wish 3CX had a similar, easy way to do the same thing. Hard to believe a 25 year old system has a leg up in this department. . . . . .

 

[mlump]

tlsallada,

I have done something slimier to this with a customer that uses 3CX Digital receptionists as a MotD announcement system. With this Scenario they would be overwriting the current message with a new one every-time they rerecord.

Basically i created a voicemail only ext (sent all calls to voicemail via the forwarding rules) in no place is this ext referenced in the call flow and it is unpolished so it should never get a call. I then had the customer record the IVR message as the greeting for this extension. Once that was done all you have to do is use the mklink command to create a symbolic link from that savevmgreeting.wav file to an appropriate file name under the prompts directory. Once this is finished and confirmed working just select the symbolic link in the prompts directory as the Digital receptions message.

When the message needs updated all they have to do is call in and update the greeting on that extension and you have updated the IVR greeting.

Again i don't know if this is a perfect solution for you because you cant update dial options on the IVR and you would have to rerecord or manually update that savevmgreeting.wav file to the slandered message when they get back in the office.

 

[tech27]

Here's how I think I'll solve it for a couple smaller clients:

Create a dummy extension that goes straight to voiecemail or a Digital Receptionist if the call needs to move on somewhere else (like another DR) after the weather message is played.

The voicemail greeting or the Digital Receptionist audio message will be pre-recorded.

In addition to the default "inbound rule" we created, I'll create another inbound rule that forwards all calls to the dummy extension or Digital Receptionist we created above.

I'll instruct the customer to login to 3CX, open the "Inbound Rules" window, and simply 'move up' the Weather Rule to position #1. Then once the offices re-open, they'll move it back down to the bottom, below the default inbound rule, effectively disabling it.

The only gotchya is that the default inbound rule routes calls based off the DID (in our case a * wildcard since the customer only has 1 DID). You can't create another rule with a wildcard DID, so you must create the Weather rule using a wildcard CALLER ID.