A few years ago, I worked with a two different organizations who had the same scenario.  They had a main number for the security department. This number was for a Response Group Workflow, which would ring the security staff and a couple of additional phones in the security area, such as the break room.

That worked well when there was someone in the security office to answer the call, but it meant that calls would go to voicemail if there were no security staff in office. This happened often, especially in the one organization that was closed at night and the security staff member had to do patrols.

The solution for both was to setup the Response Group Queue timeout and overflow actions to “forward to telephone number”:

Note the formation for the telephone number – you need to enter it as if it’s a SIP address, with your SIP domain after the @.

Yes, all of my lab environment domain names are colors! I set the desktop background of all the servers to be the domain name color, which helps me stay straight on which environment I’m connected to.

Okay, that’s cool, we can forward calls to a mobile or analog or any other phone as a timeout action on a queue. Tune in next blog post, where I show you how to send a call to any PSTN destination from a Response Group IVR.