Hey Folks,
I’m a residential user and pretty new to voip.ms.
Here’s my situation: my 11 year old has started an odd job business with some other neighborhood kids and is giving out our home phone number (perfectly reasonable). What I would like to happen is:
- Caller calls
- Phones ring for 4 rings (ish)
- IVR - “to leave a message for the family press 1, the kids’ business press 2”
- Route to one voicemail or another.
So I created the IVR, but I’m not seeing that kind of flow. I looked at Call Hunting, but didn’t seem like IVR is a possible destination there.
Any ideas how to achieve that routing?
Thanks!
Hello @kernelklink,
You cannot have this workflow with a ring group at this moment since it cannot move to an IVR, but only to a voicemail.
But you can have the IVR first and route to the desired destination, then this would go to the desired voicemail if the call is not taken.
What I would do is simply buy a new phone number (DID) for the kid’s business. This is really not expensive and when the adventure is over, you can drop the number, or if the adventure goes longer, it has a worthy life. 
DID numbers are cheap to buy nowaday, and cheap to maintain. I myself have two numbers since years, and I use both with social tools/apps.
Kind regards!
2 Likes
Yeah, I’ve thought about that, and for a couple bucks a month it is indeed not a big deal.
Any way I could do it without the ring group, just ring the DID a few times and then go into an IVR?
Hello @kernelklink,
Yes, you can do the following:
- In your DID, forward your call to the usual phone.
- Then click on the top right on “Failover”
- Select “If No Answer”.
- Then select the IVR you want the call to go to.
This should produce the behaviour you desire. Note:
- I am not sure if you should set a “Voicemail associated with DID”. I do not know if the voice mail will kick in in case the phone is not picked up, or if the “If No Answer” will kick in. So just keep that in mind when testing.
Maybe a Ring group in fact
Also, just maybe you can try a Ring Group instead of a phone with the same technique, but I am really not sure it will work. But just maybe:
- In the DID, set the “Ring Time in seconds” to 4 rings (20 secs).
- (Set the Fail over as above, same technique.)
- Go in your Ring Group and
- make sure each member’s ring time is longer time than 20 seconds, like 30 seconds.
- This will make sure the ring group will not send you to the Ring Group’s voice mail.
I did not think of that possibility in my first reply, but it might work. The idea is that the DID will send the call to the ring group, and hopefully make it “ring” for “Ring Time in seconds”, then the failover would kick in and send the call to the IVR.
It’s worth trying.
But for the first solution with a standard phone, it should work as expected.
Kind regards!
1 Like
Hey, sorry it took so long for me to try it, but that absolutely worked! Thank you! The Ring Group, maybe didn’t work, but I really don’t need a group as the only endpoint I really use is an FXS in the kitchen.
That hidden Failover menu is interesting!
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Glad that worked out – and yep, that “hidden Failover menu” is the key, since (as @aleclerc noted) a ring group can only fall back to voicemail, not to an IVR.
For anyone who finds this later, here’s a fun angle: we’ve been building an (unofficial) MCP server for VoIP.ms that lets an AI assistant like Claude drive your account in plain English. Out of curiosity we gave it this exact scenario as one sentence:
Set up my home line so it rings my SIP phone for about 4 rings, and if no one answers it goes to a phone menu: press 1 for a family voicemail, press 2 for the kids’ business voicemail. Create both new voicemail boxes, use my “Home Menu” greeting recording for the menu, and wire it all up.
It landed on the same DID-failover approach @aleclerc described, and did the whole build itself:
- created the two new voicemail boxes (Family, Kids Business),
- created the IVR (press 1 → family box, press 2 → kids’ business box) using a greeting recording,
- pointed the DID at the phone with a ~20s ring time (~4 rings), and set the DID’s Failover / If No Answer to the new IVR.
It read the account first, picked non-colliding mailbox numbers, verified the final routing, and even flagged the same open question @aleclerc raised – what happens on the no-selection timeout, which really needs a live test call to confirm.
(Not affiliated with or endorsed by VoIP.ms – just something we built on top of the API. Happy to share more if anyone’s curious.)
The prompt and the result:
