Using Intelligent Numbers to work flexibly.

Peter French, Product Manager and expert about everything Myriad, talks about how remote working is no longer the barrier it used to be when it comes to inbound calls. 

Many of today’s businesses operate a hybrid model of working, with employees choosing between home working or office locations. But regardless of a employee’s physical location, it’s never been more important to businesses that incoming calls can be handled efficiently and deliver a seamless customer experience. 

Intelligent Numbers commonly have a number of tools that can be used individually or in combination to ensure that important calls are handled effectively. They are not tied to a physical device or location and instead these numbers are located in the cloud. By using a call routing plan, incoming calls can be directed towards any PSTN number either directly or with additional features such as playing a message before being connected, being routed to voicemail at certain times of the day or being queued if the destination is busy.

Nasstar’s Myriad platform has a powerful set of features that allow easy creation and configuration of call routing plans using an intuitive drag and drop interface. These can also be used with a live dashboard to show metrics such as the incoming call volumes per hour or per day, and a breakdown of how many were answered successfully and those that weren’t. Meaning it’s possible for businesses to give complete control to their employees of where they wish to answer their calls or to create a plan that gives them a fixed range of options to choose from.

When an employee is using a device that isn’t always used for work calls (such as their personal mobile number or their home landline) it’s often useful if they can easily understand which calls are for work and which ones are personal. A neat way of achieving this is to use Myriad’s “whisper” feature. This allows a message to be played to the person receiving the call whilst the caller is still hearing ringing tone. The message can be configured to announce either which Intelligent Number the caller is ringing, the calling line identify of the caller or both. The receiver of the call can then be offered a choice of whether to accept or reject the call. This aspect is particularly useful to prevent business calls accidently being steered to an employee’s personal voicemail service or answering machine.