Question
Is it possible to automate the routing of calls to a particular phone number depending on the time of day? For example, would it be possible to have calls routed differently outside of business hours, for an on-call/after hours team?
Answer
If your account is under the Professional or Enterprise Zendesk Talk plans, you can add an overflow number when business-hours are configured. This way, if your customers call when all your agents are busy or outside business hours, you can automatically route overflow calls to an alternate number.
If you can't use an overflow number, then you aren't able to automatically route calls based on a specific set of business hours. Talk is set up so you can apply one set of business hours schedule to a phone number. Talk is also set up to automatically route calls to voicemail if a call is received outside of the applied schedule.
This means if you have a schedule set up for your business hours, within Zendesk (example: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm) and apply that schedule to a specific Talk number, any calls that are received outside of this schedule are routed straight to voicemail for that number.
For more information, see this article: Using multiple schedules for Zendesk Talk (Enterprise and Advanced Talk only).
As a workaround, you can update your greeting to include a message about your business hours, indicating something to the effect of, "Our normal business hours are 8-5, if you're calling outside this timeframe and need immediate assistance, please press 3". From there, you can have that number route to a different number or forward the call to an external number. Below are some resources to assist with setting this up:
- Managing outgoing greetings: Creating a custom greeting
- Route incoming calls with IVR (Talk Professional or Enterprise)
14 Comments
Will this eventually be built in?
Hey Josh,
At this time we do not have any plans to build this feature out. If you would like to see this feature in Zendesk we highly encourage posting in the Product Feedback forum as our product managers are always looking there for new feature ideas. I did not see a post about this currently so this would be a great one to start.
You write that it is possible to write a script to change our settings. Have you got an exemple to do that ? Or a link to the api that explain the process ?
Thank you for advance for your response.
Hi Emilie!
I'm afraid I'm not sure what script you're referring to...I don't see any reference to it in this article. If you can give me some more information on what you're trying to do, I can get you pointed in the right direction!
@Emilie we were able to get around this with a custom script and google calendar. Script searches the G Cal for available agent and activates talk. Wasn't too difficult and the API documentation is pretty good.
Afternoon,
If you use a schedule and apply it to a number, during non-business hours it'll go straight to voicemail. I understand how to update the greeting for the non-business hours voicemail, but I don't understand how to provide the option to "press 3" (for example) for the call to route to another number.
This feels like a huge gap in IVR functionality to not have the ability to easily forward to another number during non-business hours. We rely on this, as we partner with an answering service that our clients can talk to for critical and down issues when we're closed.
Please help!
Thanks,
jamie
Hi Jamie!
I'm not 100% sure of the answer here, so I'm going to see about getting someone in here to help you out. Stand by!
Hey Jamie,
Here's the work around we have that should work for your situation:
Talk about your business hours in your IVR greeting: This is by far the simplest workaround. You can update your greeting to include a message about your business hours, indicating something to the effect of, "Our normal business hours are 8-5, if you're calling outside this timeframe and need immediate assistance, please press 3". From there, you can have that number route to a different number or forward the call to an external number. Below are some resources to assist with setting this up:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001221287-Can-a-Zendesk-Talk-IVR-menu-be-used-to-route-calls-after-hours-
Hope that helps!
Hi Keith,
Thanks for the follow up. The issue is that work around requires you to remove your schedule from the phone number settings.
If you apply a schedule to a phone number, during non-business hours calls go straight to voicemail and Routing can’t be added. Essentially, I’d like to the ability to apply a schedule to the phone number and when calls come in during non-business hours provide the customer an option to press 1 to leave a vm or press 3 if they have a critical/down issue and need after hours Support (this will forward to another number).
I hope this makes sense. :)
Thanks!
Jamie
This would be a great addition. We are looking to move to Zendesk talk and away from Ring Central, but this may be a dealbreaker as there is no way to route callers to an out of hours call schedule.
Hi all -
Product managers do not subscribe to the comments section on Knowledge Base Articles. If you have product feedback, please share it in the Product Feedback topic in the Community, which they do read.
As a reminder, all posts are subject to the Community Guidelines.
Cludgy, but workable solution: You can actually do this now, but it requires a bit of manual intervention, and paying for an extra seat.
Disable Talk business hours so that your agents answer 24/7
Create an "After Hours" agent and configure that agent's "agent forwarding" to the desired external phone number. This cannot be a toll free number, since toll free number forwarding is blocked.
Log in as this new agent once, and set the status to "Online: Phone."
From the Talk dashboard; change this new agent to unavailable
End of shift: Manually forces all agents to unavailable at the end of your business hours and then change the new agent to "Available: Phone" --Since this agent will be active; all inbound calls will be immediately forwarded to the external number after hours.
Start of shift: Change the "After Hours" agent to unavailable.
Hi @Bob - Thanks for sharing this workaround! In this case, the external phone number doesn't need to install Zendesk, correct? We want to route it to an external call service when none of our agents/staff is available, but they don't use Zendesk.
Hey Michelle,
The external phone number doesn't need to install Zendesk in this scenario which you and Bob are discussing above. Hope this helps. :)
Best,
Amie
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