Overview
This article will provide an overview of the various calling rules you can configure when setting up a Team. You can use calling rules to configure total ringing time, how the call is offered to different members of your team (i.e. who gets called first, and for how long), and what happens to unanswered calls.
It contains the followings sections:
- Choose how long you want callers to wait (in total) for someone to pick up
- Choose an offer pattern
- Choose how long we ring someone before also ringing the next person
- What happens if no one picks up
To find these calling rules in the account portal, go to Manage Teams and edit an existing team, or add a new one.
Choose how long you want callers to wait (in total) for someone to pick up.
This setting determines the total amount of time callers will have to wait while we try to ring the members of this team.
- Select a time frame from the dropdown (let us know if you need custom shorter ring times).
- Rather than choosing the number of seconds/rings, we recommend you ring your Spoke Phone number yourself (dialing from your mobile or a landline) and see what it feels like for callers ringing in.
- Make sure at least one of the group members is set to available when you test.
- If a caller rings in when no members are available, it will not ring at all, instead, it will skip straight to your option for what happens if no one picks up.
- If a caller rings in, and all available members decline/reject the call, it will immediately stop ringing and skip straight to your option for what happens if no one picks up.
Choose an offer pattern
There are two ways Spoke Phone can ring people's phones. These are called 'offer patterns'.
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Ring everyone at once
- When a call comes in, ring everyone marked call first.
- If they aren't available or don't pick up after a certain amount of time (you will configure this length of time in the next step), ring everyone else in the group also.
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Round-robin (fairly distribute calls)
- When a call comes, ring the call first member who has been idle (not answered a call for this group) the longest.
- If they don't answer, also ring the next call first user in the queue.
- If no call first users answer, also ring the 'not call first' user who has been idle (not answered) the longest.
- This pattern will continue until there are no more members to call, or until the total ringing time (Choose how long you want callers to wait for someone to pick up) has been met.
Choose how long we ring someone before also ringing the next person
This setting is only relevant if you have the offer pattern 'round robin' or a mix of 'call first' and 'not call first' members.
- Pick a timeframe to determine how long we ring the first person in the 'queue' you have configured before also ringing the next user.
- If someone in the queue isn't available (offline or busy), or decline the incoming Spoke Phone call it will skip them straight away and go to the next user.
What happens if no one picks up
This setting determines what happens with unanswered calls to this team. These are known as On No Answer Rules.
- Send to an external number will forward the call to an external phone number.
- Send to voicemail will play the caller the voicemail message you have configured for that team. If the caller leaves a voicemail message, all available members of the team will receive a notification on their phones. You can also add an email address to receive voicemail notifications by email.
- Send to another team will forward the call to another team.
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Send to Twilio. If you have deployed Spoke to your Twilio Account, you have two options for routing unanswered calls:
- Twilio Studio. If you had originally sent the call over to Spoke from Twilio Studio, when you send the call over you are able to tell Spoke to send [unanswered] calls back to either a Twilio Studio Flow, a Twilio Task Router Workflow, or a Twilio Function. See Routing Twilio calls to Spoke Phone in the developer API documents.
- If the call was originally a direct call to a Spoke phone number, or a call transferred into Spoke from another application (e.g. a call transferred from Cisco UCCE to Spoke), then you can use the Spoke Team's On No Answer Rules to Send to Twilio, and Spoke will redirect calls to whatever Twilio Function you define.