Our company has a lot of people who are now splitting their time working in the office and remotely. In my mind, one of the basic reasons for a system like RingCentral is that users can receive their calls on any device, no matter where they are. Last week, I found out that call forwarding does not work as expected.

Consider the following scenario. Jane works in the office sometimes and other times she works from home. Susan is going to be out of the office and Jane is her backup. Jane happens to be working from home that day and Susan configures her account to forward her calls to Jane.

The expected behavior would be that Jane would be able to receive those calls regardless of which device she is using (desk phone or Mobile app). However, it does not work. The forwarded calls ONLY ring to Jane's desk. There is no way to forward another user's calls to another user's mobile app.

I spent some time on the phone with Ring Central support trying to configure this and they started trying to walk me through a convoluted process of setting up a call queue. All for a temporary forwarding scenario that was to be in place for a single day.

The other option they proposed was to temporarily assign Susan's number to Jane. That also seemed like a lot of work for a temporary forward.

Call forwarding should forward to any device, based on the call recipients call handling configuration. Full stop. In other words, if User A forwards to User B, User B should receive those calls no matter what device they are using.

I'm completely baffled as to why it doesn't work this way.