A dedicated receptionist will give your company a personal touch any time the phone rings. Depending on your preferences regarding what happens when the call times out, there are two different ways to direct calls to a dedicated receptionist.

If you want missed calls to go to the receptionist’s voicemail

If you would like missed calls to go to the receptionist’s voicemail, follow these setup instructions:

1. Log in to office.ooma.com as an administrator and navigate to Phone Numbers under the Settings page.
2. Find your company’s main phone number in the list and click the corresponding line.
3. Choose your receptionist’s extension from the corresponding dropdown menu.
4. Save your changes.

By default, incoming calls to the company number will ring your receptionist’s phone and missed calls will go to their voicemail. The receptionist can also turn on call forwarding to forward calls to another user’s phone number by using the End User Portal as described in this article.

If you want missed calls to go to the Virtual Receptionist or to another user

If you would like to use the Virtual Receptionist to back up your dedicated receptionist, you can create a Ring Group. The company’s main phone number will be assigned to this Ring Group and it will contain the dedicated receptionist as the single member. The Virtual Receptionist or the user who acts as a backup receptionist can be identified as the extension that will receive missed calls. A Ring Group with this setup can be useful for any position whose job requires them to frequently forward calls to a backup extension.

Tips and Tricks: If the receptionist’s only device is an IP phone, they can place the phone in Do Not Disturb mode to temporarily stop it from ringing and to automatically forward it to the Virtual Receptionist. This feature is useful if the receptionist must step away from their desk for a moment or if they wish to take a lunch break.

You can set up a Ring Group this by following the instructions in our Ring Group setup article.