Voicemail Boxes
Voicemail boxes are the next thing you need to be sure to complete. Voicemail boxes obviously catch all callers that you miss and allow them to leave a message for you. You should at minimum always setup a company voicemail box. Without a company voicemail box, the caller will just continue hearing the ring tone or your greeting if no ring schedule rules are met or if no one on your ring schedules answers. Voicemail boxes are very similar to ring schedules, so we will only go over the differences below.
- Voicemail boxes are always active. If you want to turn it off, you would delete it. If you want to save it for later use, you can simply edit it. For instance, changing the schedule or setting a filter that would never trigger the voicemail would effectively be the same as setting it inactive. In the case of a special holiday greeting for you voicemail, simply pick that holiday greeting and revert back to the other greeting after the holidays.
- Voicemail boxes can also be accessed via extensions simply by choosing the voicemail box when creating the extension.
- For setting up your company voicemail box, you should not enter a worker/group. Leave this field blank. If you would like to setup personal voicemail boxes for a worker or group, record them and then enter them in the Worker/Group field.
- Always set a recording for your voicemail box. Recordings are used to tell us what message you want played to the caller before allowing them to leave a message.
It’s important to make a company general voicemail to catch all missed calls or calls that are not routed via a ring schedule. We recommend a delay of at least 30 seconds.
Delays less than 30 seconds, can sometimes make it difficult for your team to answer before the voicemail picks up the call.
You may want to have 2 general voicemails; one for business hours with the 30 second or more delay and another outside of business hours with a shorter delay, so the caller doesn’t have to wait to leave a message. Just remember, if you have long recordings or greetings that you want your callers to hear, your ring delays need to not occur before the message is finished and your voicemail should be sufficiently later to allow your staff to answer. So if you had a 15 second greeting, your staff delay would be 13-15 seconds and your voicemail would be 30 or more seconds to allocate your staff 15 seconds to answer.
For additional information, view the video below. Or you can go to our IO Phone Setup Guide or view all IO Phone help docs that will show you how to use certain features as well.