Setting up a ring group for just Saturdays

[TonyLoftus]

Hi All,
Firstly, minor introduction. My name is Tony and I started learning 3CX from about March this year. So far, have got my wings by passing the first online course. I'm trying to set up a particular rule which I'm finding a little more difficult than I imagined. I did a couple of searches in this forum and found a couple of similar threads, one of which I thought seemed straight forward, but I seem to be still doing something wrong.

Scenario
Business has Mon-Fri office hours of 0800-1700, Saturday only - 0800-1200. This is how their current system wide in office hours are configured

To Change:
Rather than go to the IVR Welcome when clients call on a Saturday. Business would like all phone extensions to ring.

I have tried to follow this guide:

https://www.3cx.com/community/threads/different-office-hours-for-weekdays-and-weekend.69027/

1, Create ring group and add members

2, Create Dummy Extension (805) Under forwarding rules, have set two exceptions:
caller ID * Specific hours. Mon-Fri 0800-1700, forward to extension IVR Welcome
caller ID * Specific Hours. Saturday 0800-1200, forward to Ring Group

3, Go to Inbound Rules, Add DID rule for landline number. During office hours to send calls to the dummy extension (805) When outside of office hours, send call to a voicemail box

In testing however (current time 9:08am NZDT) the call goes straight to the ring group. I'm currently testing this on our own business 3cx system, and have only added myself in the ring group. Can anyone see where I'm going wrong? Hopefully the screenshots are of some help. I've cropped out names/email addresses/first part of ph number.

 

[TonyLoftus]

7 mins into "6. Extension Profiles and Fowarding Rules" of the intermediate course, and I hear that the order of the rules is important. Have just changed the order so that the IVR welcome (mon-fri 8-5) is first in the list.

Quick test and its now going to the IVR welcome. Now just need to test Saturday. Might tweak it so that my saturday rule runs this afternoon between 1630 and 1700. Will report back with results.

 

[NickD_3CX]

Hi Tony and Welcome!

Ok, so what you said can be done, and quite frankly is being done by a lot of people for a long time.
However, this may be the time to introduce you to the 3CX Call Flow Designer (CFD for short):
https://www.3cx.com/phone-system/call-flow-designer/

Essentially what this is is a tool to create "intelligent" IVRs and do things way beyond the scope of what the built-in Digital Receptionists can do.

Doing what you want with the Call Flow Designer would look like something like this:


It's not everyone's cup of tea, but even overcoming simple things like this is sometimes extremely easy.

The only "down-side" (if I can call it that) is that if you need to make any changes, you would have to make the change in the CFD project, then compile it and reload it into the 3CX Management Console.
Then again, for any changes, you would always have your customer(s) coming back to you for this...

 

[TonyLoftus]

Thanks for the reply, yes I had a quick look at that and got quickly overwhelmed! I'll have another look at that this week hopefully. The rule didn't work on Saturday unfortunately. Still went straight to the IVR welcome. Which seems like whatever is first in the exception list, thats what it executes. Despite having rules around what time.

Really would have thought it would have seen the first rule, realised it wasn't Mon-Fri 8-5, and then gone to the next rule. Yes its Saturday, yes its between 8am-12pm, so I'll ring the ring group. At least thats how I read it lol. I have some access control experience (security - Paxton/Concept) So am aware that sometimes you only need one thing unticked or undefined, and all sorts of things you have planned, don't happen as a result!

 

[Alphabetic]

Thanks for the reply, yes I had a quick look at that and got quickly overwhelmed! I'll have another look at that this week hopefully. The rule didn't work on Saturday unfortunately. Still went straight to the IVR welcome. Which seems like whatever is first in the exception list, thats what it executes. Despite having rules around what time.

Really would have thought it would have seen the first rule, realised it wasn't Mon-Fri 8-5, and then gone to the next rule. Yes its Saturday, yes its between 8am-12pm, so I'll ring the ring group. At least thats how I read it lol. I have some access control experience (security - Paxton/Concept) So am aware that sometimes you only need one thing unticked or undefined, and all sorts of things you have planned, don't happen as a result!

If you install the CFD and go to your My Documents folder you will find a folder called "3CX Call Flow Designer Demos" and in there is a folder called "TimeBasedRouting".

If you open that project and edit to your needs and export, you should have to do less work and not from a blank canvas.

 

[AWS2P]

did you try to put saturday rule first in exception list ?

 

[TonyLoftus]

did you try to put saturday rule first in exception list ?

Sorry about the late reply, despite setting specific times, I put the Saturday exception first in the list and it called the ring group. Even though it was midweek during 8-5! I haven't revisited this in awhile, and I'm going to try the call flow app at some stage. Everything I had done up till now, isn't as fresh in my head as it was when I made this thread. I'll look at adding to this thread further down the line hopefully. Thanks.