Route

Overview

The Routes page allows you to create and maintain routes into and out of your phone system.

Inbound

Inbound routes are perhaps the easiest to understand and the most common one that needs to be maintained.

Inbound Routes control how a call into your organisation is delivered. Some of the more common things that you might do with a call are:

• Make one or more handsets ring
• Play a message
• Send the caller to a Voice mailbox
• Give the caller a choice of options (IVR) e.g. Press 1 for Sales, 2 for Accounts.
• Enable recording
• Play an after-hours message

You can also perform some far more complex operations on a call all from the  Routes.

Outbound

In less common situations you may also need to configure Outbound routes. You can use an Outbound route for the following:

• Least cost routing - send different calls via different 'trunks' based on the type of number
• Enable recording
• Caller ID Masking
• Dialing restrictions (e.g. who can dial international no.s)

Understanding Routes

Each route belongs to a context and is triggered based on a Phone No.  pattern referred to as a 'Target Match'. When a call comes into your phone system or is dialed from an internal extension the call is placed into a specific context. For inbound calls this is called 'inbound', for internal calls, it is called 'handset'. 

When a call is being processed the dialed number is matched against all of the available Route Target Matches within the Context. The Route with the most exact Pattern that matches the dialed No. is then triggered and used to control the flow of the call.

priority

Routes also have a priority which affects the Target Match process.  Routes with a higher priority  (1 being the highest priority) are tested for a match first.  If a match is found at any priority level then no further routes are considered.  Priorities can be any value from 1 to 1000.

schedule

Routes may also have a Schedule. When a Schedule is applied to a Route it will only be active during the defined period of time.  If the Route is not active then it won't be considered when doing the above Pattern matching.

For inbound calls the DID (incoming phone no) that the caller dialed is used to match against the Pattern. For outbound calls the Phone No. that the staff member dialed is used to match against the Pattern.

When two Patterns exactly match the phone number the longest of the two Patterns will be selected.

Creating a Route

Click 'New' to create a new Route.

Select the Context (inbound for inbound calls and handset for outbound calls dialed from a handset).

Enter the Target Match that is to be used to trigger the Route.

The following Target Match pattern characters are supported:

Enter a meaningful full Name for the Route. This might be something like the department name.

Finally, enter a Description that will help you or someone else in 12 months time understand why this route was created.

Target Match pattern examples

The following provides some examples of how to use patterns:

Steps

Once you have created the Route you MUST add one or more Steps to the  Route. A  Route without any Call Steps will simply hang up the call.

To create a Call Step click the 'Steps' tab and follow the instructions.

Recording

To enable Recording for this  Route click the 'Recording' Tab.

Schedule

To limit what times of the day this  Route applies to click the 'Schedule' Tab and set the time range.