Question

Forward Call Queue to 3rd party (answering service) after 1 minute

  • 28 July 2016
  • 7 replies
  • 1187 views

Customer service is very important to our company, but there are times when we are short staffed due to breaks, holidays and vacations. In order to prevent one of our customers from holding longer than usual or being forced into voicemail, we have contracted with a 3rd party answering service and want to forward those calls to them instead. This gives our client a live voice and an opportunity to speak with someone versus being sent to a voicemail or staying on hold. This is not available at this time, but there is an option in call queues to forward to voicemail after x minutes or play a message and disconnect. We would like to option to forward to an external number (cell phone or 3rd party answering service).


7 replies

Eric - you can set up and Advanced Rule in your Call Queue for Answering Service and just log in and turn it ON when you need it.  

-You can create a Virtual Ext that fwds to the Answering Service and add that ext to the Rule. 
-Or You can set the Queue to Unconditionally Forward to the Answering Service. 
If you do this for say 30 out of 40 extensions, Do you need to make 30 rules and log in and turn each of them on and off?
None of these replies actually work becuase when you forward a call from the call queue to an external extension it will always ask the answering service to select 1 to accept the call.  Most answering services have a greeting when your call comes over and no one to press 1 to accept the call.  RingCentral needs to turn this feature off but there is no way to turn it off on the call queue.  They simply need a selection for never but they refuse to add it.  The customer service dept is clueless on this as well as there is currently no solution other than to look at Ring.io as an alternative. I'll update this post once they provide a simple solution to their call queue. 


Dear RingCentral - just add an option to select Never on the call queue routing under incoming call information for call queue calls!!  
We are a 24 hour answering service and we have several companies that use us for roll over calls including other RC users, all of our calls are answered by live operators that are trained and used to pressing one. This is not intended as an advertisement, just to let you know it can be done. 
We have the same issue. when a caller is in the queue for too long we wanted the call forwarded to an external answering service. Does anyone know how to accomplish this?
Hey Mac, this could be done.  Few factors are at play depending on how your call queue is setup.  the option is ONLY available when using Rotational or fixed call handling .  NOT Simultaneous Ring.

Once past that you could create the over flow queue and setup a Virt extension that will forward the call to your answering service.

Now you could possibly get charged extra if more than 10 calls in a month are forwarded out from a virtual extension.  that is a whole other discussion.

You could look up Overflow Call Queues in the support section or work with someone to help configure this for you.

Thanks

Chuck Fuscone
Certified Ring Central Consultant
Chuck@Yoritguy.com

We need better queue overflow settings. This includes, forward to another queue or extension after x seconds, and forward to another queue or extension after all members fail to answer.

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