Engage Voice | All about phone books

You may find that agents will occasionally need to transfer inbound and outbound calls to certain external destinations — that is, destinations outside of the system. These destinations can include DID phone numbers and SIP numbers. 
 
If you’d like to streamline your process and make it easier for agents to access commonly used destinations, you can enter and save those destinations into your inbound queue or campaign’s dedicated phone book so they can be accessed by agents dialing on those queues and campaigns. 
 
You can also create phone book entries that are global — that is, available to all agents on your account — (according to your settings configuration) across all queues and campaigns. These global phone book entries can be created and configured at any time via the Phone Book tray setting under Agent Tools. 
 
Now, as noted above, each queue or campaign will also have its own dedicated phone book. Please note that phone book entries created at the queue and campaign level will only be available within the queue or campaign in which they were created — they won’t be available anywhere else. Only entries created at the global phone book level will be available across all queues/campaigns.
 
To configure corporate and/or contact center extensions (agents and supervisors), read Configuring the corporate directory.

Creating global phone book entries

To create a global phone book entry that can be made available across all queues and campaigns in your account, take the following steps:
1. Navigate to Agent Tools > Phone Book via the left-hand navigation bar
2. Click the Add Phonebook Entry button at far right to open the Configure Phone Book Entry modal window
3. Enter a Name for your phone book entry
4. Select from the Country dropdown menu
5. Enter a Destination for your phone book entry
6. Enter any Notes you wish to accompany this entry
7. Click Ok to save your changes and exit the modal window
Let’s review each of the settings discussed above.
  • Name: The name of the phone book entry that agents will see in their dropdown menu
  • Destination: The DID or SIP destination the call should be transferred to. You can either enter a standard, ten-digit phone number here, or you can enter a SIP destination to which you would like to transfer the call. If transferring to a SIP destination, be sure to include the prefix SIP: before the SIP destination. (So if the destination is [email protected], you’ll enter SIP:[email protected])
  • Notes: Add any notes here. Please note that these notes will not be visible to agents; they are only visible in the admin UI view
Now you have one or more global phone book entries that can be shared across as many queues or campaigns as you like. Just remember — global phone book entries don’t automatically get shared to all queues and campaigns by default. You’ll have to enable the global phone book for each queue and campaign you want it to appear on. We’ll discuss that next.

Making global phone book entries available to queues and campaigns

If you’d like to make your global phone book available to a queue or campaign, follow the steps below.
1. Navigate to Dialing > Campaigns or Routing > Queues via the left nav bar
2. Select a campaign or queue
3. In the campaign or queue’s General page, scroll down to the Agent Settings section
4. Check the box labeled Enable Global Phone Book
5. Save your changes via the Save button at bottom right
And that’s it! Your global phone book will now be visible to all agents dialing on any queues or campaigns in which you enabled this setting.

Creating queue and campaign phone book entries

Now that you know how to use the global phone book, let’s review how to create queue- and campaign-specific phone book entries. Creating phone book entries works the same way at both the queue and campaign level. To create a phone book entry for either a queue or campaign, follow the steps below. 
1. Navigate to Dialing > Campaigns or Routing > Queues via the left nav bar
2. Select a campaign or queue
3. Select the Phone Book tab from your queue or campaign’s configuration panel
4. Click the Add Phonebook Entry button at far right to open the Configure Phone Book Entry modal window
5. Enter a Name for your entry
6. Select from the Country dropdown menu
7. Enter a Destination for your phone book entry
8. Enter any Notes you wish to accompany this entry
9. Click Ok to exit the modal window
10. Click the Save button at bottom right to save your changes
Let’s take a closer look at each of the settings discussed above.
  • Name: The name of the phone book entry that agents will see in their dropdown menu
  • Destination: The DID or SIP destination the call should be transferred to. You can either enter a standard, ten-digit phone number here, or you can enter a SIP destination to which you would like to transfer the call. If transferring to a SIP destination, be sure to include the prefix SIP: before the SIP destination. (So if the destination is [email protected], you’ll enter SIP:[email protected])
  • Notes: Add any notes here. Please note that these notes will not be visible to agents; they are only visible in the admin UI view
Once you add these entries to a specific queue or campaign, they’ll immediately become available for agents to use via the Transfers icon that appears during a live call in the agent UI.

Managing phone book entries

Each time you create a phone book entry, it will immediately appear in a table in the Configure Phone Book Entries section. The table contains information about each phone book entry, like its identification number (used for tracking and reporting purposes), name, destination name, any notes attached to that entry, and the date that it was created. 
 
You’ll also have the opportunity to edit or delete each entry via the pencil and paper Edit icon and the Delete x icon at far right.
 
If you have many entries that you wish to filter through quickly, click into the search bar and begin typing any identifying information for the entry you’d like to see. The table will automatically filter your results as you type.

Phone books for agents

Agents can access and make use of phone book entries via the Transfer icon that appears in the agent interface (just below the dialpad options) while the agent is on a call. Once they click that icon, it will open a small Call Transfer modal window containing a dropdown menu with three headings. In this case, the menu under the Phonebook heading will be populated with any numbers/destinations you have created and attached to the current queue or campaign. 
 
Please note that the Phonebook dropdown menu will display all global phone book entries along with any queue or campaign phone book entries you may have created.
View of the Call Transfer Phonebook in the agent interface
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