Tim D'Annecy

telephony

#telephony

Call Monitoring or call shadowing is a feature offered by Ringcentral that allows specified users to silently join other users' ongoing calls.

This functionality is desired for training and call center environments and is intended for managers or supervisors to listen in on ongoing calls between agents and external customers.

Prerequisites

Before enabling this feature, you must have the following in your environment:

  • At least 2 users.
  • At most 100 users.
  • All users must be licensed with an MVP Premium account.
  • All users must have a call out number associated with their extension.

There are two user roles for this workflow that are admin-managed from the Ringcentral web dashboard:

  • “Can Monitor”: A user with this role can join an ongoing call of any user in the “Can be Monitored” group. I will refer to these users as “managers” in this guide.
  • “Can be Monitored”: A user with this role can have any ongoing call joined by users in the “Can Monitor” group without immediate notification that this is occurring. I will refer to these users as “agents” in this guide.

I will refer to the third party callers as “customers” in this guide.

Notifications

After adding a user to the “Can be Monitored” group, they will receive the following notification email:

There doesn't appear to be a way to suppress this notification.

Create the Call Monitoring group

  1. Login to Ringcentral with an admin account.

  2. Navigate to Phone System > Groups > Call Monitoring and click + New Call Monitoring

  3. Enter a name for the Call Monitoring group. This will not be displayed to users.

  4. After entering the name, expand the “Group Members” setting. Select at least one user for “Can Monitor” and at least one other user for “Can be Monitored”. (Note: I was unable to have the same user in both categories, so a user seems to only be able to use one or the other):

  5. Save these group settings and return to the main Ringcentral view.

“Can Monitor” user setup

After the admin stuff has been completed, the manager with the “Can Monitor” role must do the following:

  1. Open the Ringcentral web or desktop app and login with their user account.

  2. Click on the “Settings” icon at the bottom left. Click on “Phone”.

  3. In the “Phone” menu, scroll down to the Heads-Up Display (HUD) section and enable the HUD by flipping the switch:

  4. Save the settings, accept the notification, and return to the main Ringcentral view.

  5. From the main Ringcental view, click on the “Phone” icon.

  6. Under the “HUD” section, click on “Extensions”. Click on the “Add an extension” button:

  7. Type the name of the “Can be Monitored” user(s) and then click the Add button:

Monitoring a call

After the admin and user changes are made, the “Can Monitor” manager can then monitor when a “Can be Monitored” agent is in an active call using these steps:

  1. The “Can Monitor” user must open the Ringcentral web or desktop app and login using their user account.

  2. Navigate to “Phone > HUD” and join the call by hovering over and clicking on “Monitor Call”:

From there, there are several tools that the “Can Monitor” manager can employ:

  • Call whisper: Talk to the “Can be Monitored” agent without the customer hearing.

  • Call barge: Talk to all parties on the line. This is like a conference call.

  • Call takeover: Drops the “Can be Monitored” agent from the call, leaving the manager and the customer on the line.

  • Call recording: Begins a recording session with no notice to the customer or the agent. These recordings are stored in the “Call history” tab in the Phone section of the Ringcentral web or app interface.

Discuss...

#telephony #Windows

Ringcentral requires audio files to be saved as .mp3 files.

To do this, you'll need to convert your audio that you recorded in the Voice Recorder from .m4a into .mp3 using the app Audacity and the ffmpeg plugin. Audacity and ffmpeg are open source programs that can convert audio into different formats. Audacity is the main program and ffmpeg is an extension that Audacity uses to open .m4a files.

Install Audacity and the ffmpeg extension

Before you'll be able to convert the file, follow these steps to get Audacity and ffmpeg set up on your computer:

  1. Download the Audacity installer: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases/download/Audacity-3.1.2/audacity-win-3.1.2-64bit.exe
  2. Run the file and install Audacity with default settings: image-20211130111005914
  3. Navigate to the ffmpeg downloader page: https://lame.buanzo.org/ffmpeg64audacity.php
  4. Click on the link for the ffmpeg v.2.2.2 installer: image-20211130111421621
  5. Run the file and install ffmpeg with default settings: image-20211130111510466

Convert your audio file

After the setup is complete for both apps, follow these steps to convert your audio file:

  1. Open Audacity and navigate to File > Open and select your .m4a file: image-20211130111754961
  2. Navigate to File > Export > Export as MP3: image-20211130111904955
  3. Choose where you want to save the file and leave all options as default. Click the Save button: image-20211130112121743
  4. Leave the export options as default. Click the OK button: image-20211130112225196

After the window closes, your conversion will be complete. You can close Audacity without saving the file.

Navigate to the location where you saved the .mp3 file and upload it to Ringcentral.

Discuss...

#telephony

If you're setting up a phone or faxing system, you're going to need to make test calls and faxes to verify that things are working.

I wanted to write down the test numbers that I've used that are working as of 2021-Nov-12.

Phone numbers with voice utilities

These numbers can be called and have tools that can test functionality or connection issues with your phone.

Initial list from https://shaun.net/resources/test-phone-numbers/ and https://thetestcall.blogspot.com/

Country Number Note
Canada +1 416 342 9562 Voice echo
Canada +1 250 412 5922 Voice echo
Ireland +353 1 687 7776 Voice echo
United Kingdom +44 20 8759 9036 Caller ID check
United Kingdom +44 20 3026 4621 Voice echo
United States +1 800 444 4444 Caller ID check
United States +1 213 621 0002 Test tone
United States +1 631 791 8378 Voice echo
United States +1 510 315 1211 Voice echo and callback
United States +1 802 359 9100 Voice echo and latency check

Phone numbers for simple call placement

These numbers can be used to test a successful call placement, without any utilities.

Phone numbers with texting utilities

These numbers can be used to test texting functionality.

Country Number Note
United States +1 650 456 4556 US to US only – SMS/MMS echo
United States http://www.smseverywhere.com/send.htm Test SMS

Fax numbers with utilities

These numbers can be faxed to or from to test the functionality of your faxing system.

Country Number Note
Australia +61 1300 368 999 Send to and receive receipt confirmation back
Australia +61 0396 400 999 Send to and receive receipt confirmation back
United States +1 888 473 2963 Send to and receive receipt confirmation back
United States +1 855 392 2666 Send to and receive receipt confirmation back
United States +1 650 530 9014 Send to and receive receipt confirmation back
United States +1 855 330 1239 Send to and check quality on https://www.faxtoy.net/
United States +1 213 294 2943 Send to and check quality on https://www.faxtoy.net/
United States https://faxzero.com/ Send fax and test receipt