Incoming Call Routing
Incoming Call Routing is not available under the Free and Essentials Plans. Please upgrade to a Standard or Enterprise Plan to use this feature.
Opsgenie Incoming Call Routing provides a phone number and manages the routing of incoming calls to this phone number based on your on-call preferences. This can be used, for example, as a support call-hotline that routes incoming calls to the right on-call engineers.
How it works
Setting up a support call-line via Opsgenie is simple and easy.
- Provision a phone number(s) (available for many countries) from Opsgenie.
- Specify which group, team, user, schedule or even escalation Opsgenie will route the call to.
That's it. Now I call this number, and a welcome message (which is configurable) is read to me before I get connected to one of your on-call users. While Opsgenie finds and dials the on-call personnel, I'm listening to the music Opsgenie's playing to me, waiting. If one user can't be reached, Opsgenie tries another user on the on-call list. If no one is available, I'm redirected to leave a voicemail. Meanwhile, Opsgenie has created an alert for this very call that I'm making. The users that are responsible for the call are notified via e-mail, SMS or mobile push that there is an incoming call in progress.
When a user picks up the call, Opsgenie prompts him with a message to confirm the pickup. This is done in order to prevent voice-machines from picking up incoming calls. After the user presses a digit, Opsgenie connects the call; and also acknowledges the alert on behalf of the user that answered the call.
Benefits
There are a number of benefits to using Opsgenie Incoming Call Routing:
- Calls can be forwarded to anyone in the world, enabling geographically dispersed organizations to provide support seamlessly.
- There is a language support for messages read to caller. This way, callers who are speaking different languages can use Call Routing.
- The alert generated by Opsgenie for the call can be handled like any alert in Opsgenie, rules and policies can be used to route the alert to the right people based on the caller’s phone number.
- Alert activity log indicates whether the call was answered, how long it lasted, etc.
- Information about the call can be forwarded to team chat rooms using Opsgenie integrations with Slack, HipChat, Campfire, etc. and to other systems via Opsgenie webhook or Marid integration.
Auto-Attendant feature
You can also configure Opsgenie to prompt the callers for pressing keys to choose which users they want to talk to (e.g Press 1 for tech support, press 2 for...). Auto-Attendant feature is very easy to configure, as explained below this page.
Take Incoming Calls via Web Browser
- You can also take incoming calls via your web browser in new alerts page.
- With this feature, you will be able to take calls right from your computer without waiting for it to dial you.
- After you pick up the call on the alert, you’ll be connected to the caller and the call routing process will be stopped.
- Please note that this feature can be used with browsers Chrome and Firefox.
Cost
Incoming Call price is $10 per month per phone number (note that our Standard & Enterprise plans include one phone number for free). After that, there is a charge of $0.10 per minute for calls forwarded to US and Canada, and $0.35 per minute for calls forwarded to international phone numbers. See all the details of pricing in Opsgenie Pricing page.
Instructions to add Incoming Call in Opsgenie
- Please create an Opsgenie account if you haven't done already.
- Go to Opsgenie Incoming Call Integration page,
- Opsgenie automatically provides you with an available phone number. You can select another country and the number will change.
- Specify the recipients that Opsgenie will be forwarding the call to. Call recipients can be:
- A team. Opsgenie will route the call according to the team's escalation; which you can configure from your team's dashboard.
- Users.
- A group. Opsgenie would try one of the members of the group. If the first member does not respond, Opsgenie would try a second member.
- A schedule. Opsgenie would determine the user who is on-call based on the schedule and forward the call to that user.
- An escalation. Opsgenie first tries the users of the immediate rules of the escalation; then passes on to the backup rules in order. If the escalation has repeat enabled, it will repeat the escalation rules until someone picks up or the limit to number of users to try is reached.
Opsgenie dials the users in the recipients in the order you add them. For example, if you put a schedule as the first item in "Forward Call To", then Opsgenie will dial the on-call users of that schedule first.
- Click 'Save Integration'. You will purchase the number when you save the integration. Trial customers can use it entirely for free, until they subscribe to a paid plan.
Incoming Call Notifications
Opsgenie sends notifications to the on-call personnel when there is a new incoming call in progress. For example, if you're forwarding the call to a schedule, all the users of the on-call group will get an immediate notification about the incoming call. The notification method can be SMS, e-mail or mobile and is configured in User Profile.
An example of how the notifications work
Let's say you've configured team1 for taking calls. When a new incoming call comes, as Opsgenie starts dialing the members according to team1's escalation, it also starts sending the "incoming call notifications" to the team.
Notifications are sent like a new alert notification; team1's escalation is processed: the immediate users get the notification immediately, and backup users will get the notification after the escalation's configured time, given the "Incoming Call alert" is not acked or closed in the mean time.
How does the incoming call alert get acked or closed?
If a team member answers the incoming call, the "incoming call alert" will be acknowledged automatically, thus, the notifications will stop. Similarly, if the caller hangs up the call before any agent was able to answer, the alert will be closed automatically and again the notifications will stop.
There are three options you can select for the incoming call notifications:
- Notify when a call comes in: The default; notifies the call recipients immediately when the call is received by Opsgenie.
- Notify only if the call is not answered in X minutes: Can be used to avoid notifications for misplaced calls, by putting a delay.
- Notify only if the caller leaves a voicemail: Notifications are sent only if the caller leaves a voicemail. The voicemail link can be found as a note added to the incoming call alert.
Call Forwarding with Auto-Attendant
You can also setup an advanced routing based on input from the caller. Using Auto-Attendant, the flow of an incoming call becomes:
- Opsgenie picks up the call, reads the Welcome Message as before.
- Then, the caller is prompted with the Auto-Attendant Message you specify in the configuration. Think of something like "Press 1 for tech support, 2 for .."
- The caller responds by pressing keys on their phone.
- Opsgenie forwards the call to the matching recipients.
Things to note about Auto-Attendant:
- If the input the caller entered matches no keys in your configuration, Opsgenie asks the caller to retry. After the second mismatch Opsgenie hangs up the call. All these actions will be logged in the alert created by Opsgenie for this call.
- You can add an option with the key () which Opsgenie will use as the default forwarding, in case the digits match no other option. For example, let's say you have 3 routing options with keys 1, 2 and (). If the caller presses 4 upon hearing the Auto-Attendant Message, he will be forwarded to the recipients of option ().
- Incoming call notifications will only be sent to the entities (user, team, schedule etc.) that the caller is being forwarded to.
Using Audio Files For The Messages
If you want, you can use your own audio files to be played to the caller instead of text-to-speech. Just click on the Upload Audio File next to the message you want to customize, and browse an audio file of your choosing. Your files will be uploaded when you save the integration. You can remove the file and save the integration to switch back to text-to-speech.
Supported types for audio files are .mp3, .wav, .gsm, .aif and .ulaw.
Note that you should only upload audio files of 8kpbs bitrate. High bit-rate audio files will produce bad quality sound because of the compression.
Call Routing Precedence (Who's dialed first, who's dialed last?)
Who does Opsgenie dial before others when a call is received? Let's explain this with an example:
Let's say you've configured a schedule named schedule1 as the first call recipient for your incoming call. There are two on-call parties under schedule1 at present; escalation1 and group1. escalation1 is configured to notify user1 immediately; and group2 5 minutes later.
Example:
schedule1
escalation1
*user1 - immediately
*group2 - 5 minutes later
group1
Say a call comes now. The immediate on-call recipients of schedule1 are user1 from the escalation, and the users of group1. So Opsgenie will try to connect the call to a random user, selected from user1 and users of group1. If s/he doesn't pick up, another random user will be tried from the same party.
When no one is left to dial from the immediate on-call party, Opsgenie moves on to the secondary recipients; namely group2 from the escalation. The users of group2 will be tried in random; and if no one picks up, the caller will be redirected to leave a voicemail.
Incoming Call Language Support
When a user calls the number in your integration, the messages read to caller can be in eight different languages.
It also applies to customisable messages like "Welcome Message" and "Leave a Message". For example, when you set the language as German, these messages will also be read in German.
Additional Features of Incoming Call Routing
- Redirect to voicemail is optional. You can disable it if you like, so that when no on-call user is available, instead of prompting the caller to record a voicemail, Opsgenie says "Please try again later" and ends the call.
- If caller hangs up the phone before an on-call user answers the call alert is closed so that on-call users not notified.
- If you want to use call routing only for taking voicemails, and notify your on-call personnel but not actually dial them, you can set "How many users should be tried" to zero in the configuration, under "Other Settings" section and save the integration.
Updated over 5 years ago