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Answer parked inbound calls at the desk

When an inbound call is routed to you, Orbit keeps the caller’s line parked on the voice platform while your dashboard rings every device you are signed in on — open browser tabs with the softphone live, plus registered desk and mobile phones. The caller hears a short hold prompt, your devices race, and the first Answer wins. This guide covers the model, the day-to-day answering flow, and the edge cases: two tabs ringing at once, declining, nobody answering, and retrieving a parked caller from another handset.

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1. The park model in one diagram

Read the diagram as a contract:
  • The caller’s leg is parked, not dialed into a room. The platform holds the line and plays a short prompt so the caller knows the call is live.
  • Every device you are signed in on rings at the same time.
  • The first Answer bridges the parked caller to that device only. Every other ringer stops, and the call is never double-bridged: a second, late Answer anywhere is a harmless no-op.
  • The ring window is bounded. If nobody answers in time, the call falls through to the route’s fallback — usually voicemail (section 4).

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2. Answer from the web softphone or the attendant console

Web softphone. An incoming call shows a dialog with Answer and Decline in every open tab where the softphone is signed in. Click Answer and the parked caller is bridged to that tab; the dialogs on your other tabs close on their own. Work from tabs that stay signed in — a signed-out or sleeping tab does not ring. Attendant console. The attendant console rings the same call through the same softphone, next to its live queue and transfer panels. Answering there is the same single accept: the console takes the call and every other device stops ringing. Both surfaces send the same accept, so the rules in the next section apply identically to each.

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3. Multiple devices, one call

The same user is routinely reachable on two browser tabs and a desk phone at once. The outcomes:
  • First accept wins. Whichever device answers first takes the call, and the platform locks that outcome. A second Answer from another tab arrives to a call that is already live and simply stops that tab’s ring.
  • Other ringers auto-dismiss. As soon as one device answers, the incoming-call dialogs on every other tab and phone clear on their own. There is nothing to click away.
  • Decline only matters on the last live ringer. Declining on one tab stops that tab while the other tabs and phones keep ringing. Only when the last remaining ringer declines does the ring end and the call fall through to the route’s fallback, and it is reported as declined rather than missed.

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4. What happens on timeout

The park window is bounded — today, 45 seconds from the start of the ring. If no device accepts inside that window, the platform stops ringing your devices and hands the caller to the route’s fallback, which for most routes is voicemail. The caller can then leave a message exactly as on any unanswered call. How the call reports afterwards:
  • Answered — a device accepted inside the window. The call log shows an answered call. Note that the call carries a positive duration from the moment the park began holding the line; talking time starts when your device bridges.
  • Missed — the window elapsed with no accept, or the caller hung up while your devices were still ringing. Both shapes land as missed calls, and both trigger missed-call alerts when you have them enabled.
  • Declined — the last live ringer declined (section 3), reported separately from a missed call so a deliberate decline is not counted as an unanswered ring.
When a caller cancels mid-ring, your ring dialogs close as soon as the platform sees the caller go — you are not left staring at a call that no longer exists.

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5. Retrieve a parked call from another handset

The same park primitive behind the inbound flow powers the shared Parked Calls lobby: nine numbered slots, the first retrieval wins. A live call sitting in a slot can be picked up from any registered handset with a star code — dial *1 through *9 for the slot number, as taught in the desk phone star codes tutorial. The lobby shows which slot holds which caller; dialing that slot’s star code from a desk phone or mobile bridges the caller to you and frees the slot. The park concept overview covers when park is the right primitive versus a queue or a transfer.

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6. Operational notes

  • Park slot reuse is safe. A slot frees the moment its call is retrieved, released, or hung up, and the next park can claim it immediately. Two operators retrieving the same slot resolve to a single winner; the loser receives a clear “already retrieved” response, never a double bridge.
  • See live parked calls under Voice → Parked Calls. The lobby lists every live slot with the caller, the elapsed hold time, and retrieve and release actions, refreshing every ten seconds. Inbound calls that are still ringing you are not in the lobby; the lobby lists calls someone deliberately parked.
  • Monitor misses with missed-call alerts. The missed-call alerts guide sets up the notification that fires when a ring window elapses or a caller hangs up unanswered — the two “nobody took it” shapes from section 4.

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See also