Night Mode
Night Mode, Scheduling, Overrides and More
There is no night mode. That is to say, you’re phone system doesn’t care whether it’s night or day. We can configure various time periods or call routing switches which will adjust the way your calls are routed, but your most common interaction and use of these will be with night or day mode.
Calls can be routed differently at night, perhaps straight to voicemail or to a menu of various options.
We can define night in two different ways
At a defined schedule
With a mode button that can be activated or deactivated at will
Setting your schedule
We will set your schedule per your request.
Let us know which days and times should be routed to your nighttime options.
ie. We are open 8am-5pm M-F. We want night mode outside of those hours including all day Saturday and Sunday.
Night Mode Buttons
The night mode switch is used to place the system into night mode early or to close without any special notification. It can also be used to manually activate night mode if no schedule is in use.
When activated, the night mode button overrides the time table and leaves the system to behave as if it were nighttime until the button is deactivated.
We typically add these “Switches” to your phone’s function keys. Most likely, you will see this button if you scroll to page 2 on your physical phone or go to your “Fn Keys” on Collaboration Mobile or Web.
On your physical phone, this button will be lit up blue when override is activated. It will be off when the system is following the regular schedule.
On collaboration, the button will show a red dot next to it when the override is on and a green dot when the system is operating according to normal schedule
Green: Normal. Red: Override
Updating Call Routing
“At night” calls can be routed to a voicemail, a cell phone, a different group of users, or a menu of various options. Actually there are far more options than that.
Contacting us via email is the best way to let us know how you want your calls routed.
ie. We need our hours updated to 7am-7pm. After hours, we want our calls routed to a special message “We’re currently closed, please hold for a dial by name directory” and then route the calls to a voice activated directory.
A Schedule Example
This example will demonstrate a complicated schedule. This will show why Night Mode is just a shorthand term we use.
Maybe you are open from 8am-5pm. However, you want to be able to answer calls all the way up to 10pm. Then you want calls to go straight to voicemail. On the other hand, from 8am-9am, you want calls to go to an automated attendant so that there are less interruptions during your morning meetings.
We can set a period from 10pm until 8am where calls will go straight to voicemail.
Another period will exist from 8am-9am where calls will go to an auto attendant.
From 9am-5pm, calls will route normally, but from 5pm-10pm calls will ring straight to your extension on only your app.
Switch Examples
We refer to it as night mode, often because we have a switch to enable or disable a mode which we call “Night”. Similarly, we usually create a “Holiday” button.
Continuing our example above, you may want to be able to trigger “Meeting” mode at will. In that case, we can create a Meeting button and program it to route like the 8am-9am schedule when that button is active.
We could allow calls to ring to your app until you activate a “Sleep” button. Then, instead of calls routing to your app from 5pm-10pm, they will route to your app from 5pm until you choose to activate the Sleep button.
These buttons can allow for all kinds of routing. You could choose to redirect calls to another store or to an offsite worker when these are active. You could take calls normally but first trigger all calls to record when that button is active. Perhaps you would like to use that button to route calls to ALL USERS instead of the dedicated few who usually act as receptionists. We could call that the “BUSY” mode button… Then you could press that button when you’re “BUSY”.
And yet, from a technical standpoint, there is no such thing as “BUSY MODE”. These are constructs that we create and use.
Finally…
First, we hope this has been helpful to understand your Night Mode configuration. We also hope it has inspired you to think outside of the box in call routing!