Answer one office phone from other office?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. I've got two offices in the same town. Due to staff absenses I need to be able to answer the phone at one office from the other office (and vice versa). I need to be able to distinguish which office is being called. What options do I have?

A. Simplest way is to use the exchange line Call Diversion facility. The non-staffed office would divert its line to the other site, which would need either a separate line or the Call Sign feature (second number and distinctive ringing) to distinguish calls. You would pay for diverted calls (at local rate, obviously). (If your lines are not BT, the services may be called something else.) A Centrex service provides exchange lines which look like PABX extensions. These can be provided over multiple sites connected to the same public exchange. BT Featureline is a cost-effective Centrex service for smaller businesses. The non-staffed office can have its calls forwarded to the other one. You'd need a separate line to distinguish the calls, but can still answer from a single phone (using "pick-up" facility). You wouldn't pay for the diverted calls. If you need to handle more than one call at a time, it could get more complicated, but there are ways of handling this. If you have a data link between the sites (or even just Broadband Internet), and more than a few lines/extensions on each site, you could interconnect PBX systems, or even have remote extensions from a single PBX. These solutions are technically more complicated than the others, and only cost-effective if you have a lot of lines/extensions at each site. Get call diversion on each office's phone, and set the unstaffed one to divert to the other when you need it. However, doing it this way won't let you know which number was originally dialed. So you need to get CallSign on each office phone, and divert to that instead of the office's real number. However, if you want the diversion to be automatic (A diverts to B when A is busy, B diverts to A when B is busy) and leave it set-up, you'll need some way of preventing circular diversions. You can get a bypass number for each of the diversion targets and divert to that instead. However, BT apparently don't allow a CallSign number to be a bypass number as well.

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