Flying Solo
If you’re the only person taking calls on your mobile through your telephoneer service you’re probably already set up. The main thing you’ll need to consider is how you want to handle voicemails for calls forwarded through telephoneer.
If you want your mobile to handle voicemails
Telephoneer Dial Actions (the things that tell telephoneer where to send your calls) set a “dialling timeout”. As long as you set the time out to be longer than the ring time on your mobile, the calls will be picked up by your phone and sent to your mobile’s voicemail service.
Most mobile services are set to ring for 15 seconds “out of the box” (but you can change this quite simply, see below) so set your telephoneer dialling timeout for 20 or 30 seconds so your mobile picks up the call.
If you want telephoneer to handle voicemails
To have telephoneer send unanswered calls to voicemail, just set the telephoneer dialling timeout to less than your mobile’s ring time (say 10 or 12 seconds).
The other case you need to think about is when you’re on another call. In this case the call will be answered immediately by your mobile (and sent straight to its voicemail) unless you have call waiting enabled.
Call waiting lets you handle incoming calls when you’re already on a call. Of course you can also ignore the incoming call and let it go to voicemail. As long as the telephoneer dialling time out is less than the call waiting ring time, telephoneer will handle the voicemail.
Activating Call Waiting
Most smartphone handsets have a way of activating call waiting in their settings apps, but under the hood they’re just using dialling codes.
To activate call waiting enter this key sequence on your phone’s keypad
*43#
and press the ‘call’ button.
To deactivate call waiting use
#43#
To check your call waiting status use
*#43#
Changing your mobile’s ring time
If you want to change the length of time your mobile rings before going to voicemail use the following codes:
To set the ring time use
**61*101** (number of seconds: 15, 20, 25, or 30) # e.g. **61*101**20#
and press the ‘call’ button
Running a Team
If you’re running a team you’d likely want to set up telephoneer to forward calls using a “hunt group”. A hunt group or line hunting is a group of phone numbers that are set up to handle incoming calls. In the telephoneer web app this is set up through a Dial Action when you add multiple contacts.
The dial action lets you choose if the numbers are dialled all at once (simultaneously) or one after the other (sequentially). Either way, the first phone that answers picks up the call.
As before, if one person is on a call and does not have call waiting activated, their mobile will immediately pick up the call and send it to voicemail before telephoneer has a chance to give it to someone else. So you’re definitely going to want to activate call waiting on all mobiles in a hunt group.
Similarly, you’ll want everyone’s ring time to be more than the telephoneer dial action timeout if you want telephoneer to handle the voicemail.
Summary
To summarise, if you want telephoneer to handle voicemails for forwarded calls:
- Ensure the phone’s ring time is more than the telephoneer dial action timeout.
- Activate call waiting
