Getting started with Smartnumbers Control

Smartnumbers Control provides instant and automatic call redirection and flexible call management, ensuring your business can function as usual during periods of disruption, such as an office move, technical migration or a disaster.

Using Smartnumbers Control you can set up the Smartnumbers (DDIs) in your estate to:

• Deliver calls to one of up to seven destination numbers and/or announcements that you can manage yourself
• Instantly redirect to a secondary or tertiary destination when the primary number cannot be reached
• Route calls according to up to nine plans that can be activated depending on the scenario
• Show insights about the way your calls are delivered
• Manage calls for your sites or business units independently in separate routing services

Powerful call management

Smartnumbers Control provides convenient and secure management of your inbound calls. Calls to each Smartnumber can be redirected to any destination, such as desk phones, mobiles or an announcement service. Calls can also be instantly redirected to an alternative destination via the Smartnumbers Hub web portal when needed.

Ultimate business continuity

Smartnumbers Control monitors every incoming call and automatically redirects calls when a network failure or congestion that would prevent successful call delivery is detected. In the event of call redirection, all calls to that Smartnumber will be handled in the same way until Smartnumbers Control identifies that the problem has been resolved.

How to get Smartnumbers Control

Most of our customers will get Smartnumbers Control in one of two ways:

• Porting in their existing numbers to turn them into Smartnumbers and setting up a new Control service
• Being upgraded from another Smartnumbers service

Depending on which of the above applies to you, your Control service will either need to be set up from scratch, or it will contain routing identical to the service you had originally.

User permissions

Smartnumbers Control offers a granular permissions system that supports nearly every use case. For instance, you can use it to:

• Allow a telephony manager in your organisation to manage how your entire number estate is routed
• Let a site manager manage everything about how calls going through a particular routing service get routed
• Give a disaster recovery team member only the permission to change the plan that determines which of the predefined routes are used
• Allow a team member to view how calls are routing without being able to change the setup

Routing services

Control routing services are sets of Smartnumbers (DDIs), their routes, and associated plans that can be managed independently from one another. For instance, you may wish to quickly change where calls are routed for some of your numbers but not others. 

As an example, some of our customers create separate routing services for their different office sites or business units. The calls going through them can then be managed using different plans.

The routing services page displays a list of all your routing services:

• The name of the routing service
• How many Smartnumbers are in each service
• The currently active plan
• The number you would call to change the active plan
• You can access a routing service and edit its routes and plans by clicking the Manage button
• In the three dot menu on the right you can:
• Edit the service details
• Delete the service if it’s not in use 

Managing a routing service allows you to edit destination numbers to define routes and create and activate plans.

Several Control services may come into play for a particular number, for example in cases where nuisance call protection or time-based routing are set up in your call flow.

Managing a Control service

To manage a routing service, find it in the list of services in Smartnumbers Control and click Manage. This will open a page that lists all the details of the routing service, allowing you to see the service name, change and manage your plans, edit the routing service details, and manage the routes for your numbers themselves:

Editing service details

To manage the overall settings of your Control service, click the three-dot menu at the top right of the page and select Edit service details. This opens a dialog that allows you to change the service name and settings for plan activation by phone in the General tab:

Please contact the Customer Support team (support@smartnumbers.com) to set up plan activation by phone.

The Failover reasons tab allows you to manage for which reasons your numbers should be rerouted from their primary destination to secondary and eventually tertiary routes. For more information on how to set this up, see automatic failover.

Routes

The routing table is at the core of a Control service - it allows you to specify up to 7 destinations that can be used in plans to determine how your Smartnumbers are routed:

The table shows:

• Smartnumbers
  These are your DDIs that you ported into Smartnumbers Control, which is why they cannot be changed.
• Call flow
  This column shows which call flow(s) your numbers belong to when you hover over the icons.
• Name
  The friendly name for the number - this does not affect call delivery and is typically used to identify the person, room, office, or other entity the number belongs to.
• Email
  The contact email - this does not affect call delivery and is typically used to identify the person, room, office, or other entity the number belongs to.
• Routes one to seven
  Each of the remaining columns is called a route. You select which routes calls should be routed to when using plans. Each route can be renamed to make it easier to recognise by clicking on the route name. To learn more about updating the contents of your routes, see Managing routes.

Each cell corresponding to a route and a Smartnumber is called a destination. These destinations can be updated one by one using the inline edit functionality in the platform itself, or you can download the routing table, update routes using a table processor, and reimport it.

In case you have too many numbers to go through visually, the routing table offers a handy search feature that lets you find the number you are looking for based on the Smartnumber, Name, Email, or destinations set up in the other columns. You can also download a copy of the table for your own records using the Export button.

Changing and managing plans

Plans are where the individual routes of your routing service come together to determine how each call gets routed. When a call comes into the Control service from your call flow, the primary route in the currently active plan determines which route is tried first for the particular Smartnumber dialled. Then, the secondary and in turn tertiary routes are tried.

In the below example, the primary route is first tried, so the call first comes in to the Sales team. In case a call cannot be delivered to the relevant person on the Sales team, a member of the Customer Support team is called as the secondary destination. If neither are available an announcement is played to the caller.

To access the Plans page and see which plans you have set up, click on the Plans item under the relevant routing service in your left-hand navigation, or press the View plans button at the top right:

For more information on how to add, manage, and activate plans see the article on Plans.

 

You are now ready to manage your Smartnumbers Control service! For answers to the most common questions, see also the FAQs.