Route call based on Customer Department

[victormatla]

Hi all,

I have a CRM integration with our CRM system Autotask. In Autotask, all our customers are divided into several Departments, so that each customer is always supported by the same team.

My goal is to extend this setup to 3CX. Ideally, I want 3CX to recognize which Department a customer belongs to, so the call can automatically be routed to the correct Queue.

My idea was to create an AI Receptionist that asks for the company name and, based on that, transfers the caller to the appropriate Queue. However, I do not want to use the “Route by topic” feature for this, because that would require me to manually add and maintain every customer in the list.

The ideal scenario would be for the AI Receptionist to retrieve the Department via the CRM integration after the caller has mentioned the company name, and then route the call to the correct Queue. As far as I understand, this is not possible because 3CX can only perform CRM lookups based on the phone number.

Do you perhaps have any ideas on the best way to approach this?

 

[KyriacosS_3CX]

Hello,

While there maybe CFD/IVR ways of doing the pre-filtering, the AI will probably not be able to handle this task cleanly in update 8.
If you are following the discussions here, we do plan to release enhancements giving the AI more access to external variables that it can use to make decisions in upcoming releases.

Still, there is a chance we have somebody that already figured out something like your current use-case on the current implementation and will share.

 

[Evolute IT]

Hi all,

I have a CRM integration with our CRM system Autotask. In Autotask, all our customers are divided into several Departments, so that each customer is always supported by the same team.

My goal is to extend this setup to 3CX. Ideally, I want 3CX to recognize which Department a customer belongs to, so the call can automatically be routed to the correct Queue.

My idea was to create an AI Receptionist that asks for the company name and, based on that, transfers the caller to the appropriate Queue. However, I do not want to use the “Route by topic” feature for this, because that would require me to manually add and maintain every customer in the list.

The ideal scenario would be for the AI Receptionist to retrieve the Department via the CRM integration after the caller has mentioned the company name, and then route the call to the correct Queue. As far as I understand, this is not possible because 3CX can only perform CRM lookups based on the phone number.

Do you perhaps have any ideas on the best way to approach this?

CFD to route based on that. Relatively simple to do.

 

[victormatla]

I have considered using a CFD, but this would mean that we need to have all our customers’ phone numbers filled in within Autotask. However, our customers call us from multiple phone numbers, sometimes even from personal mobile numbers.

 

[NikosT_3CX]

@victormatla in this case since they call from different numbers, setup a PIN for each one and when they put it,
they are routed to the appropriate destination.
With this way, it does not matter where they call from.
Check this :

https://www.3cx.com/docs/cfd-validate-customers/

 

[victormatla]

@victormatla in this case since they call from different numbers, setup a PIN for each one and when they put it,
they are routed to the appropriate destination.
With this way, it does not matter where they call from.
Check this :

https://www.3cx.com/docs/cfd-validate-customers/

I have thought about that as well, but in practice this does not work for our customers. We have several customers with 100+ employees. This would mean that, for these customers, all employees would need to know the PIN code. In addition, we would have to manually add new customers to that list, while they already exist by default in our CRM system.

 

[Evolute IT]

I have considered using a CFD, but this would mean that we need to have all our customers’ phone numbers filled in within Autotask. However, our customers call us from multiple phone numbers, sometimes even from personal mobile numbers.

Just setup a default/catchall for the numbers not in autotask? It will at least route a good percentage of calls.

 

[nikolascx]

HI Team

The direction we are working towards is giving the AI Agent more access to external data and variables, so it can make smarter routing decisions. In the future, this type of scenario should be handled through an external lookup/API/MCP-style integration, where the AI can ask for the company name, query the CRM or middleware, retrieve the department/team, and then route the call to the correct queue.

We are working on it.. Do not worry. We totally agree that these use cases all make sense, and it is exactly the kind of routing intelligence we want to improve.