Every inbound call. Routed to the right person. Predictably.
Auto-attendant greets the caller, IVR routes them by selection, hunt group rings the right team, and the call lands on a real cellular eSIM line — all in seconds. Working hours, holiday rules, and per-department settings layer cleanly. The full UCaaS inbound routing chain on Kelir Team Starter and Team Pro.
What this is solving for.
Inbound call routing is the spine of a multi-team phone system. A customer calls the company main number — what happens next determines whether they reach the right person or hang up frustrated. The questions stack up fast: should every call go to one person? To a hunt group? Should it route by department first? What if it's after hours? What if there's a holiday? What if the line is busy?
Most SMBs solve this badly. Either everything gets dumped on the receptionist (who can't actually triage 30 calls/hour), or each team has its own number and customers have to know which one to call (they don't), or the company runs everything through a softphone UCaaS that requires the receptionist to keep an app open all day to answer.
The right pattern is the standard UCaaS routing chain — auto-attendant greets, IVR options route to departments or hunt groups, the team picks up. Customers reach the right person; the team handles the volume that's actually theirs; nobody is the choke point. Setting it up correctly the first time is the whole game.
Features that apply.
Kelir's routing platform handles every layer of inbound — greeting, menu, distribution, fallback. Configured from app.kelir.io, calls land on real cellular eSIM lines, and working-hours / holiday rules apply automatically.
Auto-attendant
Greets every caller before any user line rings. TTS-generated or audio-uploaded greeting; per-day schedules.
Multi-level IVR
The "press 1 for sales, 2 for support" menu. Up to 4 levels deep on Pro; visual builder, versioned config.
Hunt groups
Distribute the inbound across the right team — sequential, simultaneous, or round-robin.
Departments
Per-team numbers, hours, voicemail, and routing. Each department independent.
Working hours
In-hours vs out-of-hours rules apply at every layer of the routing chain automatically.
Call queuing
Holds callers when the team is busy instead of dropping them to voicemail.
Step by step.
- Step 01
Set the company main number
In app.kelir.io → Numbers, set the inbound number that customers will call. Either pick a new US number from inventory or port your existing main.
- Step 02
Create the auto-attendant greeting
Routing → Auto-attendant. Type the greeting ("Thanks for calling Reeves Construction"), preview the TTS voice, save. Configure separate in-hours and after-hours greetings.
- Step 03
Build the IVR menu
Routing → IVR menus → New IVR. Add option 1 (Sales), option 2 (Service), option 3 (Billing). Each digit routes to its destination. Preview with phantom-call test.
- Step 04
Configure each hunt group
Routing → Hunt groups. Sales hunt group: pick distribution (round-robin), add sales reps as members, set ring timeout (25s), catcher voicemail = sales shared inbox.
- Step 05
Set up departments (optional but recommended)
Routing → Departments. Each business unit (Sales, Service, Billing) gets its own dedicated number, hours, and routing — useful if customers should be able to call the unit directly without going through IVR.
- Step 06
Configure working hours
Set company-wide working hours. Mark holidays for the year. Each department can override with its own schedule. After-hours behavior: route to voicemail with custom greeting, or forward to an answering service.
- Step 07
Enable call queuing on busy hunt groups
For high-volume teams, enable call queuing on the hunt group — max queue length 5, max wait 3 minutes, music on hold, position announcements every 30s.
- Step 08
Test the full chain end-to-end
Call the company main from another phone. Verify the auto-attendant plays, the IVR menu options route correctly, the hunt group rings the right team's eSIMs, the catcher voicemail catches missed calls.
- Step 09
Roll out and monitor
Track inbound volume, missed-call rate, and queue abandon-rate from Analytics in the first week. Adjust IVR menu options or hunt-group composition based on real data.
What changes.
- Customers reach the right team without calling multiple numbers or being transferred manually.
- The receptionist isn't the bottleneck for inbound — the routing platform handles distribution.
- After-hours calls land in the right voicemail box (per-department or shared) with transcripts to triage in the morning.
- Holiday and out-of-hours behavior is configured once and runs unattended — no manual switching.
- Each department's missed-call rate is visible in analytics — operational decisions (more reps? different hours?) are data-driven.
- When customers call the company main, the experience feels professional from the first second of the auto-attendant greeting.
The right buyer.
Multi-team SMBs with 2–50 users where customers call a company main number expecting to be routed somewhere. Service businesses (clinics, contractors, agencies, professional services) and product businesses (small SaaS, consultancies, online retail with phone support) both fit. The team has at least two distinct functions (sales + support, or front-desk + providers, or admin + dispatch), and customers should reach the right one without manual transfer.
Who this isn't for: If you're a one-person business, you don't need IVR or hunt groups — Solo's auto-attendant + voicemail covers it. If you're running a 50+ agent contact center with real-time supervision, skill-based queuing across hundreds of skills, and SLA dashboards, Kelir's routing is intentionally narrower than enterprise contact-center platforms — Five9, NICE CXone, or Genesys are better fits for that scale.
Common questions
Auto-attendant handles the greeting + simple routing (route everyone to a hunt group, or route everyone to voicemail after hours). IVR adds menu-based routing on top — "press 1 for sales, 2 for support". For a single-team business, auto-attendant alone is often enough. For multi-team businesses, the auto-attendant greeting hands off to an IVR menu, and each menu option routes to a hunt group.
The hunt-group cascade exhausts (every member rings or fails to pick up within the timeout), then the call falls through to the configured catcher: shared department voicemail, an external forward (answering service, paging service), or a busy prompt. Configure the catcher behavior per hunt group from the admin portal.
Yes. Each department's main number can have its own IVR. Useful when sales has "Press 1 for new accounts, 2 for existing" but support has "Press 1 technical, 2 billing". Independent IVR trees per department.
Working hours apply at every layer of the routing chain. Mark the year's holidays in the working-hours config; after-hours behavior is per-layer (auto-attendant plays a holiday greeting, IVR may have holiday-specific routing, hunt groups don't ring out-of-hours). Set it once in late October; runs automatically through the year.
Team Starter ($29.99/seat) includes auto-attendant, two-level IVR, hunt groups, departments, call queuing, working hours, and shared voicemail — the complete routing chain for most SMBs. Team Pro ($39.99/seat) adds skill-based routing in hunt groups, four-level IVR with sub-menus, audit log, and CRM integrations on top.
For a 2–10 person team with a single department, a working configuration takes 30–60 minutes including testing. For a 10–50 person multi-department setup with multiple IVR sub-menus and several hunt groups, plan for 2–4 hours including end-to-end testing and the first week of monitoring + adjustment.
Related use cases & features.
After-hours coverage
Specifically focused on the out-of-hours routing problem.
Customer support system
Routing patterns optimized for a small support team.
Sales team distribution
Round-robin and skill-based routing for sales-rep teams.