Can agents use a soft and a physical phone?

Question

I want agents to be able to use a physical phone when in the office and a soft phone when they work from home.

What happens with dialing out? Can my team still have a single number to dial out?

Answer

Yes. You can forward calls to a physical phone through Zendesk if you want to use a physical phone when you're in the office and switch to a soft phone when you work from home.

Use call forwarding

This setup gives agents the flexibility to use a desk phone in the office and seamlessly switch to the soft phone when they work from home, which they can do in Voice (formerly Talk).

Here is exactly how it works and how to set it up.

Voice has a built-in feature called Agent forwarding. Each agent can save a phone number for forwarding, such as their desk phone extension or direct line, in their profile. They can then toggle between Via Phone and Via Browser depending on where they work. Voice tracks and records all calls.

To set up per agent:

Click the photo in the top right, then click Manage Profile

On the left sidebar, next to Agent forwarding, click + add number

Enter the desk phone number or extension

In the call console, click the globe icon and select Via Phone to receive calls on the desk phone, or Via Browser to use the soft phone

Agents can switch between these two options at any time.

Keep in mind:

Agents must sign in to Zendesk in a browser and set their status to Online, even when they use the desk phone. Forwarding works only if they're active in Zendesk.

If agents have personal voicemail on their desk phone, ensure you turn on the agent confirmation feature in the Voice settings. This setting requires agents to press a key to confirm they answered, which prevents calls from routing to voicemail.

If multiple agents share the same desk phone line, each agent needs a unique extension number in their setup to differentiate them

The system logs and records all calls forwarded to the desk phone

Dial out

Yes, you can still have a single number to dial out. Here is how outbound calling works and how to keep it consistent with a single number.

Note: When agents use agent forwarding in Via Phone mode, they must initiate outbound calls from the browser interface. Agents dial out through the call console, which then connects to their desk phone or soft phone to complete the call. Agents cannot use the physical phone alone to dial out directly.

To keep a single outbound caller ID number, you can standardize on one number for all outbound calls regardless of whether agents are in the office or working from home. Here is how:

By default, agents can select from any outbound-enabled number in the call console drop-down. This means different numbers appear to customers.

To lock this to a single number, an admin can turn off outbound calling on all but one number, so agents must dial out from that single number.

This means every customer sees the same caller ID every time, no matter which agent calls or which mode they use.

Use either a Voice number or your own existing external number as the single outbound caller ID.

To set up:

In Admin Center, select Channels > Talk and email > Talk

Go to the Lines tab

Turn off outbound calling for all but one of your numbers. See Managing phone number settings.

All agents then see only that one number in their call console when they dial out

Note: Zendesk doesn't provide a dedicated public test number to test outbound calls. To test, see Testing your voice support setup.