How to Identify Incoming Calls for Each Extension

We surveyed our SMB customers and found that nearly half of their employees spend 75% of their time working away from the office. Given this statistic, it’s clear that mobility is paramount in today’s business world. With features like call forwarding and multiple extensions, RingCentral gives your business the ability to stay connected with your customers, even when you’re out of the office. In today’s Tuesday Tip, we’ll show you how to update your answering rules so that you can identify incoming calls from multiple extensions.

Let’s say you forward all your sales, support and billing calls to your cell phone. How will you know which extension is forwarding the call? Simple! Add an identifying code to forwarded caller ID numbers. That way, you’ll be able to quickly identify which extension the call is being forwarded from, see the caller ID information on your cell phone and give the appropriate response. (“Hello, you’ve reached the sales department…”)

To do this, first log into your RingCentral account. Then:

1. Select Company Settings, find the extension you want to identify, then under Rules, select Edit
2. Find the answering rule you want to add your code to and select Edit
3. Under Forward My Calls, select Edit for the number you are having your calls forwarded to
4. Enter your code in the pop-up window

That’s it! You can select up to 5 digits for each code, and choose whether you want to place the code at the beginning or at the end of the caller ID number. Repeat these steps for each extension you’d like the identifying code appended to. If you’d like to use this option with your DigitalLine, be sure to enter your RingCentral DigitalLine as a forwarding number.

Originally published Nov 18, 2009, updated Aug 12, 2020