Keep your phone system: how the overlay works

How the overlay works

You keep your phone system, your numbers, and your carrier. Roonly gives you a new local number, and a forwarding rule in your current system sends calls to it first. When a call arrives, Roonly plays a short recorded-line notice, starts recording, and passes the call onward to your existing office line. Your team answers on the same phones as today and sees the caller's real number, so any screen pop keeps working.

Because every forwarded call physically passes through Roonly, all of it is recorded and scored: the calls your team answers, the calls that overflow to voicemail, and the calls the AI receptionist takes if you turn that on. Outbound calls never pass through Roonly, so the overlay does not see them.

Set it up

1. Open Office, then AI Receptionist. If you do not have a Roonly number yet, enter a local area code and choose Get my Roonly number. The number starts in Record and pass through mode.
2. Under Keep your phone system, enter your existing office line. This is the number calls pass through to. It cannot be one of your Roonly numbers.
3. Save. Nothing about your phones changes until you add the forwarding rule.

Point calls at your Roonly number

In the Connect your phone system panel, pick the system you use today. The panel shows the exact steps for that system, and a Something else option if yours is not listed. Every system has one of two setups:

• Soft start. Forward only missed calls: no answer, busy, and after hours. Roonly then sees only the calls your team was already missing. Calls your team answers directly are not recorded in this setup.
• Full capture. Forward every call to your Roonly number and let Roonly pass them through. This is what records and scores your CSRs' own calls.

On a regular carrier line the change is usually a star code dialed from the office phone: one code to forward, another to turn it off. Codes vary by carrier, so confirm yours if unsure. On a hosted system the forward lives in the admin portal under call handling or call forwarding. If your system cannot forward to an outside number, flip it around: publish your Roonly number on your website and business profile and let Roonly pass calls through to your existing number.

For full capture on a hosted system, the pass-through destination must be a real dialable number, different from the number doing the forwarding, that rings the same team with the same missed-call overflow. Once you forward every call, the overflow rule on your published number no longer fires, so it has to live on the pass-through line instead.

Test it

Use the Test it works panel on the same page. Press Start the 60-second test, then call your published number from a cell phone. Roonly reports the call landing, passing through, and recording. The last check is caller ID: on the phone that rang, confirm it showed the caller's number, not the Roonly number. If it did not, ask your carrier or phone-system admin to preserve caller ID on forwarded calls, or publish the Roonly number directly.

Within a few minutes the call appears in Conversations with a recording and a score.

Reverse it

The forwarding rule lives in your phone system, not in Roonly. Remove the rule or dial the carrier's cancel code and calls go back to exactly how they were before, with no help from Roonly needed.

For a short break without touching your phones, use Pause on the AI Receptionist page. While paused, calls pass straight through with no recording, no scoring, and no AI. Resume restores everything.

Related

• The AI receptionist
• Phone systems Roonly pulls calls from
• Recording consent

Still stuck? Contact support.