11 capabilities, one call
Everything the service does, in the order a call meets it.
An alphabetical feature list tells you nothing about when you would need anything on it. This one follows a single call from the moment it arrives to the record it leaves behind.
The path this page follows
- inArrives
- step 1Answered
- step 2Distributed
- answeredRecorded
What the system is made of
Before a call exists there are lines, numbers, sites and call flows. Set those up once and everything else hangs off them.
Hosted PBX
Call arrives → Your call flow → Whoever should answer
A traditional PBX is a box in a closet that someone has to patch, power and understand. Hosted PBX means that box is our problem. What you get instead is a set of things you can name: lines, numbers, groups and a call flow.
Multi-location
Call to the branch number → Branch hours → Branch team
A site is an office: an address, a time zone, a set of business hours, a calling policy. Everything below it inherits those, so setting up the second location is mostly a matter of saying where it is.
When the call is picked up
The greeting, the menu, and whether the office is open. Most of the work of a phone system happens in the first ten seconds.
Auto attendant
Call arrives → Greeting → Menu choice → Sales queue
The recorded menu that answers your main number. Press one for sales, two for service. It sounds simple and it is, until the menu has to know about Christmas Day, half-day Fridays, and what to do when nobody is logged in.
Deciding who it reaches
Ringing several people is a different problem from making one person wait, so a ring group and a call queue are separate objects here.
Ring groups
Call arrives → Ring group → First to answer
A ring group is the answer to "just ring whoever is around". Three phones ring, someone picks up. The only interesting part is what "whoever" means, and that is a decision you should be able to see rather than infer from a drop-down label.
Call queues
Call arrives → Queue → Agent answers → Overflow to voicemail
A queue is a different object from a ring group because waiting is a different problem from ringing. The hard questions are all about the caller who is not being answered: how long they wait, what they hear, and where they end up when waiting stops being reasonable.
While the call is happening
What gets kept, who may listen to it, and how long it lives.
Call recording
Call in progress → Recording → Stored and access-controlled
Recording is easy to switch on and easy to get wrong. The audio is the simple half. Who may listen to it, how long it is kept and whether the person on the other end was told are the half that gets people into trouble.
Where it rings
A browser tab, a desk phone, or a laptop that moved to a different building this morning.
Web phone
Call arrives → Web phone rings → Answered in the browser
A new line can make and take calls from a browser tab the moment it is created. Desk phones are an addition, not a prerequisite, which is the difference between answering calls on Monday and answering them whenever the courier turns up.
Remote work
Call to extension 104 → Rings desk and browser → Answered anywhere
An extension belongs to a person, not to a desk. Someone working from home, from a client site, or from a laptop in an airport is reachable on the same number and shows the same caller ID going out.
Phone provisioning
New handset → Provisioning → Registered to line 104
Zero-touch provisioning means a desk phone configures itself from the network the first time it boots. You type a MAC address and a model, choose which line it belongs to, and that is the whole task.
Microsoft Teams
Call arrives → Direct Routing → Rings in Teams
Direct Routing is the connection Microsoft built for plugging an outside phone system into Teams, so a real phone number can ring straight into the Teams app your team already has open. Teams stays the thing people use every day. What changes is what is running behind the number.
What you learn afterwards
Two dashboards. What happened, and how it sounded.
Analytics
Call ends → Call record → Activity and quality
Most phone systems ship a reporting module nobody opens, because finding anything requires knowing which of eleven reports has it. There are two surfaces here: what happened, and how the calls sounded.
Everything here is on every plan
Not one of these is an add-on, a module to enable or a tier you have to reach. The plans differ by how calls are distributed and how long the history is kept, and the cheapest one still answers your main number with your greeting.