Incoming call routing

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 team members.

Watch Incoming Call Routing in Opsgenie video on Youtube

How it works?

• You can forward incoming calls to anyone in the world. If your company has operations in various geographies, you can provide seamless support.

• You can have the incoming call routing read messages in different languages. This way, callers who speak other languages can use call routing.

• For each call you receive, Opsgenie generates an alert. Just like other alerts, you can create rules and policies to route the alert to the right people based on the caller's phone number.

• You can view basic information about the call, such as if the team member has answered the call or how long the call lasted, through the alert activity log.

• You can forward the call information to team chat rooms using Opsgenie integrations with Slack, HipChat, Campfire, etc., and other systems via Opsgenie webhook or OEC (Opsgenie Edge Connector) integration.

• You can also configure Opsgenie to prompt the callers to press keys to select which users they want to talk to (for example, Press 1 for tech support, press 2 for sales...). View Call forwarding with auto-attendant to configure this.,

When you get a call to this number, a welcome message configured by you will be read to the caller before they connect to one of your on-call team members.

While Opsgenie finds and dials the on-call team member, the caller can listen to the music Opsgenie plays as they wait. If Opsgenie cannot get a response from the first on-call team member it reaches, it’ll call the next one on the rotation. If no one is available, the caller will be redirected to leave a voicemail.

Meanwhile, Opsgenie creates an alert for this call. The users that are responsible for the call are notified via email, SMS, or mobile push that there is an incoming call in progress.

When a user picks up the call, Opsgenie prompts them 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 number, Opsgenie connects the call and also acknowledges the alert on behalf of the user that answers the call.

Taking incoming calls directly from a web browser

You can also take incoming calls via your web browser from the Alerts page. With this feature, you can to take calls right from your computer without waiting for it to dial you. After you pick up the call on the alert, Opsgenie will stop the call routing process and connect you to the caller.

This feature is currently available with Chrome and Firefox browsers.

Who are the call recipients?

Call recipients can be:

• Teams: Opsgenie will route the call according to the team's escalation, which you can configure from your team's dashboard.

• Users.

• Schedules: Opsgenie would determine the on-call team member based on the schedule and forward the call to that user.

• Escalations: Opsgenie first tries the users of the escalation's immediate rules, 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 reaches its try limit.

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 first dial the on-call team member of that schedule.

How do incoming call notifications work?

Opsgenie sends notifications to the on-call team members when there is a new incoming call in progress. For example, if you're forwarding the call to a schedule, all the members of the on-call team will get an immediate notification about the incoming call. The notification method can be SMS, email, or mobile, configured in the user profile.

A sample case
Let's say you've configured the Team 1 to receive incoming calls. When Opsgenie receives a new incoming call, it starts dialing the on-call team members according to Team 1's escalation. It also starts sending the "incoming call notifications" to Team 1.
Notifications are the same as alert notifications. Opsgenie sends notifications to Team 1 according to its escalation policy until the alert is acknowledged, closed, or end of its repetition cycle.

Acknowledging or closing an incoming call alert

When an on-call team member answers the call, Opsgenie automatically acknowledges the incoming call alert and stops sending notifications.

If the caller hangs up the call before any on-call team member can answer, the alert will be closed automatically, and the notifications will stop again.

There are three methods you can select for incoming call notifications;

• Default notification – Notifies the on-call team members immediately when Opsgenie receives the call.

• Delayed notification – Notifies if the call is not answered in a certain amount of minutes defined by you. This method is used to avoid notifications for misplaced calls.

• Voicemail notifications – Notifies when the caller leaves a voicemail. Opsgenie adds the link to the voicemail as a note to the incoming call alert. 

How to forward calls with auto-attendant?

You can also set up an interactional call routing based on input from the caller. 

A sample auto-attendant flow looks like this:

1. When a call is received, Opsgenie plays the welcome message to the caller.

2. Then, Opsgenie plays the auto-attendant audio message that you’ve uploaded before. An auto-attendant message sounds like this: Press 1 for tech support, 2 for sales..."

3. The caller interacts by pressing keys on their phone.

4. Opsgenie forwards the call to the relevant team members.

More about auto-attendant:

• If the caller enters an unknown number Opsgenie asks the caller to retry. If the caller enters an unknown number for the second time, Opsgenie hangs up the call. You may find this information in the Activity log section of the incoming call alert.

• You may create an option with the star key to use default forwarding if the caller presses the digits that do not match. For example, if you have three routing options with keys 1, 2, and star, and the caller presses 4 upon hearing the auto-attendant message, he will be forwarded to the team members of the star option.

• Incoming call notifications are only sent to the entities (users, teams, schedules, etc.) to which the caller is being forwarded.

Using audio files for the messages

You can play text-to-speech or audio files to your callers. To play an audio file:

1. Go to Settings > Integrations.

2. Search for Incoming call. Select Add.

3. Under the Settings section of the integration, enable Auto-attendant switch.

4. Select Upload audio file button.

5. If you want to change the file, you can select Remove, then upload another file.

Supported audio files types are: .mp3, .wav, .gsm, .aif, ulaw.
You can 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 dialed first, who 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 team1. escalation1 is configured to notify user1 immediately; and user2 5 minutes later.

Example:

Say a call comes now. The immediate on-call recipients of schedule1 are user1 from the escalation, and the target entity of team1's default routing rule. So Opsgenie will try to connect the call to a random user, selected among user1 and team1. If they don’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 user2 from the escalation. The user2 will be tried; 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, Opsgenie can read the messages in eight different languages.
It also applies to customizable messages such as "Welcome Message" and "Leave a Message". For example, when you set the language to German, Opsgenie can read these messages in German too.

Blocklisting numbers

Specific phone numbers and prefixes can be blocked from the Block numbers field. Once a number is added to this field, the incoming call routing phone number will not receive any calls from the specified number.

There are a few requirements for defining numbers in this field:

• The phone numbers should start with +.

• For defining a prefix, ***** should be added to the end.

• You should enter at least 3 characters while defining a number.

Supported countries for the phone numbers

If you’re using your custom phone number from Twilio, your Twilio account should route your calls via US (Region 1) to use incoming call routing.

If you’re using an Opsgenie provided phone number, you can use phone numbers from these countries:

• Australia

• Austria

• Belgium

• Brazil

• Bulgaria

• Canada

• Cyprus

• Czech Republic

• Estonia

• Finland

• France

• Germany

• Greece

• Ireland

• Israel

• Italy

• Japan

• Lithuania

• Luxembourg

• Mexico

• Netherlands

• New Zealand

• Norway

• Peru

• Poland

• Portugal

• Romania

• Slovakia

• South Africa

• Spain

• Sweden

• Switzerland

• United States

Additional features of incoming call routing

Redirect to voicemail is optional. You can disable it if you like, so that when no on-call team member 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 team member 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 team member 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.