If you have started building an Auto Attendant, you have probably realized that it can get pretty complicated. While this may seem like a challenge for some, it is a direct result of the breadth of features and custom options RingRx makes available to our customers.
One of the more confusing aspects of building and managing an Auto Attendant is managing the schedule of which Menus play at which times. These "scheduling" options are best thought of in two ways:
1) Explicit Schedule - this is set as the time and dates when your Menu will be Active
2) Implicit Schedule - this ranks the Schedules in terms of priority.
An example is the best way to introduce these two. Lets say your office hours are 9am-5pm Monday through Friday every week. You would of course setup a Menu with a Schedule to play during office hours (9am-5pm M-F) and a Menu with a Schedule to play after hours. But now lets say you have a Holiday coming up on a Monday. You are normally open on Mondays from 9am-5pm, but on this Holiday, you need the After Hours Menu to play. The way to resolve this is to create a Holiday Schedule that is active on that day. But now you have two Schedules that will overlap on the same day. How do you resolve this? You resolve this managing your Master Schedule.
The Master Schedule lets you order your Schedules visually, so you know which ones will have priority over others. The Master Schedule lets you drag and drop your schedules to order them from higher priority (Schedules priority is determined by vertical hierarchy) at the top of the Master Schedule to lower priority at the bottom. The way the Master Schedule determines which Schedule is active presently is it searches from top to bottom for the first schedule that "matches" the current time. Once it finds a matching Schedule, it executes that Schedule. In our example above, here is how the Master Schedule would look:
After you have created your main Auto Attendant functionality and you need to create some additional schedule options, like for a holiday, a training day, closure due to weather or power outage, you can create an additional schedule using an existing Menu, and set the Master Schedule so the overlapping schedules create the correct timed-functionality.
To access the Master Schedule to create a new Schedule or to re-order existing Schedules, go to Settings\Auto Attendants, then View the Auto Attendant, then select Manage Master Schedule on the lower right.
From the next screen, you can:
- Drag and Drop Schedules so they rank properly
- Create New Schedules
- Edit existing Schedules
- Delete existing Schedules
Whenever making changes to Schedules and Menus we always suggest testing by placing calls. We suggest a test call after every change you make.