For businesses with locations and customers all around the world, call forwarding is an essential VoIP feature.  Not only will this feature help your callers will reach the right agent or department sooner, call forwarding can also help you manage your employees' call volume and workload.

In this quick overview of forwarding calls on VoIP, we'll talk about the specific strategies you can use in order to make sure that your calls go to the right person at the right time - every time.

4 Techniques for Forwarding Calls on VoIP

Time of Day Routing

If you’re looking to set up criteria that will automatically route calls, time of day routing is a helpful feature. This feature allows you to route calls based on the time of day that the call comes in.

For example, if you receive a call at 8 PM EST, you can make sure that this call gets delivered to an office location that is open at that time.

Percentage Based Routing

Another VoIP feature that automatically routes incoming calls is percentage based routing. This feature routes calls based on a percentage ratio.

For example, if you have 25 employees in one office and 75 in another, you can choose to have 25% of incoming calls sent to the first office and all others sent to the second.  This can help you manage call volume and cut back on average customer hold time.

Skills-based Routing

Skills-based routing is a powerful VoIP call forwarding technique that allows businesses to forward calls to particular staff members based on their individual skill sets.  This feature allows your agents to be in multiple queues at the same time, which means that they are available to help a wider range of customers.

Call Forwarding

Almost all VoIP phone systems also offer a simple, no-frills call forwarding feature. This feature doesn’t function based on pre-set criteria, but it allows you to forward calls in real time.

With basic call forwarding, you can forward calls to other employees, whether they’re in the same office or another, and even recipients outside your company. You can also use call forwarding to ring to multiple numbers or devices in sequential order; so, if employee #1 doesn't answer the phone, there is still a chance that employee #3 can handle the call.

If you like, you can also forward calls to the voicemail of an intended recipient.

VoIP phone systems make it easy to manage each of your phone calls. This system offers a variety of features to easily forward your calls based on specific criteria that you can choose for your business. By utilizing these call forwarding features, you’ll be able to keep your customers satisfied and make sure your employees aren’t overworked.