Ring group and opening hours question....

[godskitchen]

Hello all,

I have searched and cant find the answer I am looking for.....

I have a main ring group that all incoming calls come to between 09:00 and 17:30. Outside of these times the calls are directed to a digital receptionist that states the office opening hours.

I want to be able to have calls go to another Ring Group between the hours of 08:00 and 09:00 when the phones at the main Ring Group are not manned/womaned.

I cant see a way to do this....

Any ideas?

 

[lneblett]

I think 3CX only supports the notion of in and out of office conditions for timing purposes (not withstanding the holiday function). You apparently want to do some call handling based upon the time of day.

What you may want to consider is the use of a queue. You would setup the office hours to be from 8 to 5 for example. The inbound route would point to the "Q" during office hours and the IVR for out. As a Q is reliant upon agents being logged in, your folks who are manning the Q during 8 to 9 would be logged in an answering the calls. At 9, they would log out of the Q and the call handling aspects of the Q setup would then kick in and forward the calls to the ring group you mentioned.

It will require the folks to become disciplined in managing their logging in and out of the Q, but it should get you what you are asking.

You could do fundamentally the same with another ring group, but the downside is that during the hours after 9, it will still ring the members before moving to the next ring group (the one you really want). You might also be able to use an extension whose call forwarding routines and office hours are set-up such that all incoming calls are sent to that extension and then based upon the office hours for that extension it will forward to the one ring group for calls between 8-9 and then to the other for the other hours.

Others may have different ideas.