question

garrett-cottle16216 avatar image
garrett-cottle16216 asked mary-community-moderator edited

How can teams get access to company text messages/voicemails?

We're US users of RingCentral.

We're a small team and don't currently have a receptionist/secretary to handle calls. For the past few months, we have given each user their own username/password combination to sign into a dedicated extension on the RingCentral platform. We also supplement this with a shared login (via the now-defunct RC Phone App) to access voicemails and messages that come directly to the main company number so that nothing falls through the cracks if one team member happens to be busy.

My question is this - since the RC Phone App has been discontinued, we're no longer able to sign in to the shared call group extension to receive/respond to voicemails and incoming text messages that go to the main company number.

What's the solution to this? I'm sure this is a fairly common use case where a number of team members need to be able to monitor text messages and voicemails to a shared company number.

I'm at a loss, but desperately need to find a solution so that we can continue to use the workflow we've set up.

Is there any way to have multiple users signed into a single instance of the unified mobile app?
sms and text messaging
1 |3000

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 1.0 MiB each and 10.0 MiB total.

kelley-johnson avatar image
kelley-johnson answered
Garrett, Did you get an answer to this?  I am having the same problem!  My employee and I both need access to the company number voicemails.  
1 |3000

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 1.0 MiB each and 10.0 MiB total.

garrett-cottle16216 avatar image
garrett-cottle16216 answered
No, its been pretty frustrating radio silence from RingCentral support channels. Id love a solution. Were already experiencing unanswered text messages and missed voicemails.
1 |3000

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 1.0 MiB each and 10.0 MiB total.

Kelsey Regan avatar image
Kelsey Regan answered

I would be interested in this also.

1 |3000

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 1.0 MiB each and 10.0 MiB total.

garrett-cottle16216 avatar image
garrett-cottle16216 answered garrett-cottle16216 commented

If you were a previous user of the RC Phone mobile app, you can ask Support to re-enable the functionality.


It took us a while to actually get someone on the phone (involving me direct messaging a few executives on Twitter), but they were able to restore the functionality for group access to text messages/voicemails.


Your mileage may vary.

2 comments
1 |3000

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 1.0 MiB each and 10.0 MiB total.

Garyn Charlet avatar image Garyn Charlet commented ·

What if you weren't a previous user? Can you request and use it anyway? Any info appreciated!

0 Likes 0 ·
garrett-cottle16216 avatar image garrett-cottle16216 Garyn Charlet commented ·

I’m not sure about that.

Now we’re getting messages about them disabling the RC Phone app again, which would cut off the functionality.

I can’t get in touch with anyone at RingCentral that seems to care, so inevitably we will lose the ability to respond to messages to company numbers at some point. Really unfortunate.

Seems like a huge feature to completely over look.

1 Like 1 ·
Garyn Charlet avatar image
Garyn Charlet answered garyn-charlet commented

@garrett-cottle16216

Thanks for responding! If you hadn't I probably wouldn't have dug deeper before jumping on our account rep. I founder the process to allow up tp 15 members to check messages and manage the call queue. By making them Managers of the call queue and enabling sign in with email, they get a tab to manage the queue as well as the messages.

See here: https://support.ringcentral.com/article/Create-Call-Queue.html

Sorry about the phone app! Can't you install the new RingCentral app on your phone and do basically the same thing?

g

2 comments
1 |3000

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 1.0 MiB each and 10.0 MiB total.

garrett-cottle16216 avatar image garrett-cottle16216 commented ·

I hadn't heard about this route before.

I've made the necessary changes, but I'm still unable to send text messages from the corporate number through the RingCentral app. Ideally, the messages would come in and any of the managers of the queue could reply to them directly in that thread without creating a new thread based on their own direct numbers.

The perk of having both the RingCentral app and the RC Phone app was that users could be logged into both simultaneously so they could answer calls with their own extensions but also handle messages coming to the main company numbers.

1 Like 1 ·
garyn-charlet avatar image garyn-charlet garrett-cottle16216 commented ·

@garrett-cottle16216

What a great idea! I hadn't thought about that. Thanks! If the Phone App doesn't go away, I might need to borrow your idea.

0 Likes 0 ·
Natasha Harmon avatar image
Natasha Harmon answered

We are still having this issue and RC support only tells us that we can't access call queue from the new app. The lengthy way of accessing voicemails for call queue through admin portal only works for voicemails and faxes, not texts. This is a problem for my business!! Anyone have any solutions?

1 |3000

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 1.0 MiB each and 10.0 MiB total.

garrett-cottle16216 avatar image
garrett-cottle16216 answered

So good news and bad news.

The good news is that I was able to get our team access to a group messaging inbox. The bad news is that I had to add a third party to do it since RingCentral doesn't want to support this feature.

The process is going to be getting in touch with Tier 2 Support and asking them to release text messaging capabilities on your voice line. You want to keep the voice part with RingCentral, but they'll give you an authorization that you'll need to take to whatever third party text messaging service you settle on.

That will allow the third party service (we settled on SimpleTexting) to take over the text messaging capabilities and bypass RingCentral's absurd policy not to support this feature.

Happy to answer any additional questions. It took me over a year to figure out this was possible.

1 |3000

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 1.0 MiB each and 10.0 MiB total.

Work together.
From anywhere.

Team messaging, video meetings
and phone - all in one app.


Get the new RingCentral app