In today’s world of telecommunication people are more connected than ever before. Receiving calls can be crucial to your businesses success, and missed calls can be detrimental. The call forward unreachable feature is a great tool that businesses have the opportunity to utilize but may not be aware is available, or how it works.
First, what could make you unreachable? Carriers sometimes have outages or glitches that mean your phones or internet aren’t working. Your premise based phone system (PBX) could have an outage or issue that needs to be repaired, making it impossible to receive calls. Cables or lines can be cut accidentally by construction crews. When any of these happen your business is unreachable. Your callers may get a busy signal, or they may get an error message, but the most important thing is that they DON’T reach you or your business, and that is what you want to avoid.
Call forward unreachable allows you to forward your phone lines to another number of your choosing in the event your services are down, without having to call in to a customer care number for assistance. It is a feature you set up ahead of time so that if for any reason your calls cannot connect: the carrier has an outage, a line was cut, your phone system is down, whatever it is… that call will automatically forward to a pre-designated number that you have chosen.
Should this matter to you? Absolutely, because incoming calls can be crucial to your businesses success. When a call cannot reach your phones, this can cause the incoming caller to get either a busy signal or ring no answer, or a carrier message such as “all circuits are busy” or “the call cannot go through at this time” and your business would not be able to receive the call.
Many of you are probably aware of and may utilize features known as call forward variable or remote access call forwarding. With these features, you can manually from your phone pick up the handset and dial star seven two (*72) to forward all incoming calls to a different number of your choosing. This can be used after hours, or if you are out of the office for an extended time and when you get back to the office press star seven three (*73) to remove forwarding. This feature is all done by you manually. This is not usable in the event you have a carrier or phone system outage. You would need to call your carrier and ask them to place an emergency call forwarding on your behalf and tell them what number to forward your calls to. Once you realize that the outage is cleared you would have to manually call back in to the carrier and they would manually have to deactivate the call forwarding for you. Sometimes this results in waiting on hold or waiting for tickets to be worked to remove the feature.
Most call forward unreachable features are available through a web portal. You can actually set up your primary phone number and in some cases direct dial numbers to automatically forward calls to whatever number you input(like a cell phone, a second location or an answering service.) The beauty of this is in the event of a power/service outage or PBX malfunction, the minute your calls can’t hit your phone, it automatically forwards and once the service is restored the calls are automatically directed back.
Basically call forward unreachable will attempt to connect your calls as usual and if it can’t then it will automatically forward your calls to the given number that you specify until your phone comes back on-line and then it will go back to connecting as usual.
Don’t assume that just because your carrier has the feature it is active on your lines. For some carriers it is a newer feature and depending on how long you’ve been with them you may need to contact them to activate it. We are here to help.
It’s a matter of knowing these three things:
- Does my carrier have call forward unreachable?
- If they do, how can I determine if I am set up on this feature?
- How do I access the feature and set up or change it for my business?
We can help you with all of this. If you are an Inteleconnect customer, we know which carrier you are on and we can assist you with the setup – give us a call. If you’re not a customer yet, give us a call and we would be happy to consult with you more about this and other features that you might be missing out on.
We will make sure your calls ring!
How do I know if my phone calls are being transferred to another number?