This article covers time based routing from a phone number that allows numbers to route calls at different times of the week/year.
This article assumes you are already familiar with routing and configuring phone numbers, if that is not the case then please see How do I manage/assign phone numbers? and How do I route phone numbers within a domain?.
Time based routing is a way of setting routing to happen at different times of the day/days of the year. To configure time based routing you first need a time frame which stores information of which days/times you want to route at. See How do I configure Time Frames?
Once you have a time frame, and a number you want to route, find your number within the inventory under the domain view and enable Time Frames on it.
Now that you have enabled time frames, the layout of the phone number configuration window has changed completely.
1 - Enable Time Frames: Disable/Enable time based routing.
2 - Timezone: Set the timezone that this routing will be based on, for UK time that takes daylight savings into consideration, set this to "Europe/London".
3 - Timeframe Selector: Use this to select which time frames you want to add the configuration to.
4 - Routing Window: The window that lets you choose what the routing is for each time frame.
Before we begin to configure anything we will need to explain what the goal is. In this example we are going to configure a number that is set to call a call queue during work hours, which we have set to "9am-5pm, Monday to Friday". Outside of the work hours we want all calls to go to voicemail.
We already have our timeframe named "Work Hours" that contains the time data we need, and now we need to add it to the configuration by selecting it in the Timeframe selector and clicking the green "+" button.
IMPORTANT: If a time frame is already being used by the answering rules on a user, it can no longer be used by anyone else and you will have to create a new set of time frames.
From here we can now begin the routing configuration we want:
As you can see we now have a work hours routing that routes to a call queue, and a default routing that routes to a voicemail.
However, it's important to know that these rules evaluate from top to bottom in the same way that answering rules do, this means that in order for this to function we need to move the "Work Hours" rule above the "Default" rule.
Once done click save.
TIP: TOD numbers do not show their destination in the number list because they can have multiple destinations at once, as such make sure to use the Notes field to annotate what the number is used for.
