Call routing and handling via RingCentral Answering Rules are important aspects of configuring business phone systems and today we are releasing our beta Answering Rule API capabilities. For an overview, some benefits of Answering Rules include the ability to do the following:
- Give each employee and department their own business hours and create unique answering rules as needed.
- Set after-hours rules to route calls to a home phone number, directly to voicemail, a mobile phone, or any other working number.
- Routing schedule allows calls to your sales department to transfer to one agent on Mondays and Wednesdays, and to another agent the rest of the week.
By providing access to customize Answering Rules via the API, different user experiences can be created to update these rules and updates can also be automated. A popular use case for the latter is programmatic updating to synchronize users for on-call scheduling systems such as PagerDuty.
New API capabilities include:
- Updating the User Business Hours rule via the business-hours-rule endpoint
- Updating the After Hours rule via the after-hours-rule endpoint
- Updating forwarding numbers for each rule including order ring time
- Creating Ring Groups
- Setting forwarding numbers to ring sequentially or simultaneously
- This builds on the previously released capability to: Update forwarding number phone numbers
These are described in the this Quickstart Guide.
These capabilities match the Call Handling and Forwarding Rules on the RingCentral Online Account Portal as shown below:
Originally published May 26, 2016, updated Aug 11, 2020