Group voicemail and call recording management in 3CX PBX

3CX Group Voicemail

PBX 3CX v15.5 allows you to leave a “general” voice message for a group of users included in the Group or Call Queue. Now in the call forwarding rule Connect to user's voice mail, the Queues or Groups option is available - each Queue / Group has an individual voice box. At the same time, all users in the group are sent a notification that includes the sound file of the voice message. Of course, the user parameters must have an e-mail address.

Group voicemail in the voice menu / IVR

Forwarding to a group box from the voice menu is very convenient if you need to securely record customer calls during off hours. In this case, a group voice mailbox is preferable, since not only a dedicated employee who may not be at the workplace, but also another employee from the group can process the appeal.

Group Voicemail in Group and Call Queues

In the Call Group, we can simply set up a common voice box for all members of the Group. For example, if a call arrives when all the technical support engineers are busy, they will receive a recorded voice message from the user.

Please note that in the Call Queue, a notification is sent to both Queue operators and Queue managers who may not be agents.
 

Group Voicemail

Configuring a user’s group box is convenient when it is necessary to “insure” an important employee. For example, if the warehouse manager has moved away and cannot accept the call, a voice notification is received by all his subordinates.

In addition to the forwarding rules, you can leave a voice message to the Group by entering the dialcode * 4 + group number on the phone. For example, * 480 - will leave a voice message for all members of group 80 Warehouse in the screenshot above.
  

Features of group notifications

When entering a group voice box, the subscriber will hear the standard 3CX system message for voice mail in the language set to 3CX by default. This rule does not apply to Call Queues - in them the message is played in the language set for this queue.



In addition, the following restrictions apply to group voicemail:

• MWI-notification does not appear on IP-phones of Group / Queue members (voice message indicator does not blink)
  
• voicemail not displayed in 3CX clients, including web client
  
• individual user voicemail settings are ignored, and the following parameters are used: message recording - sending attachments to participants - deleting the voicemail file on the server
  

3CX Conversation Record Management

3CX v15.5 implements several important technologies that make managing call recordings, including voicemail, as convenient and functional as possible. You can manage records from the 3CX interface: listen, delete, set quotas and set the period for deleting old records. In addition, in the latest updates you can choose which calls to record and in what format to store records.

Posting Conversations

Recordings of conversations can only be stored on the local disk of the server. This provides high performance PBX while maintaining multiple records. The storage location for the recordings is set in the 3CX interface (however, you cannot reassign the storage location for voicemail). Do not indicate the root of the disk here!



After selecting any recording, you can download it to listen to it or delete it.

Quotas and conversation recording retention policies

By clicking the Quota button, you will be taken to the user quota settings and record retention policies interface. In the latest updates, you can also specify a new format for compressing ADPCM records, however, you can only listen to them in the player, but not in the browser. The standard recording format takes 1 MB for 1 minute of conversation, while the ADPCM format takes only 256 kB.


When the quota is reached, the recording of user conversations is terminated (at the moment, only the total value of the quota for all users can be set). It is recommended to enable the administrator in the settings of the PBX so that he can take action. In addition, conversation recording always stops if less than 500 MB of free space is left on the server’s disk. This is done so as not to lose access to the PBX control interface due to disk overflow.

Select conversations for recording

Starting with 3CX v15.5 Update 5, you can set which user conversations to record: all or only external.


In many organizations, it is logical to record only user conversations with external subscribers, for example, with customers or partners. Negotiations with colleagues may not be so important, so you should not take up valuable disk space with these records, especially if the PBX is hosted on a cloud hosting.

In the 3CX Enterprise edition, you can also allow the user to independently disable (or enable) the recording of a conversation by pressing a button on the IP phone.

View Call Records in 3CX Web Client

We are often asked the question: how can I see my own recordings of conversations in the 3CX web client?



At the moment, this setting is in the user settings, the tab Auto tuning phones - 3CX Client.


You can allow the user only to listen to their own conversations, and to delete them. These settings apply to all 3CX clients: web client and applications for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.