Configure internal dialing settings for your organization and locations

You can customize extension lengths, routing prefixes, and dialing preferences (internal and external) to be compatible with the dialing habits of your users. The internal dialing settings help define your organization’s extensions and how your employees make internal calls. In this guide, we’ll review how to configure these settings for your organization and for specific locations.

You can also configure the outbound calling permissions for each of your locations. For these steps, see this guide.

Feature prerequisites

Once these features are modified, users must restart their phones for changes in dialing preferences to take effect.
User extensions shouldn’t start with the same number as the location's steering digit or outbound dial digits.

Configure internal dialing settings for your organization

From Control Hub, go to Services and select Calling.
Select Service Settings and scroll to Internal Dialing.
Configure the following optional dialing preferences, as needed:
- Location Routing Prefix Length - Choose the number of digits to be used to connect with users at other locations. We recommend this setting if you have multiple locations. You can enter a length of 2-7 digits. If you have multiple locations with the same extension, users must dial a prefix when calling between locations. For example, if you have multiple stores, all with the extension 1000, you can configure a routing prefix for each store. If one store has a prefix of 888, you'd dial 8881000 to reach that store.
- Set Steering Digit in Routing Prefix - Choose the number to set as the first digit of every routing prefix. You can set a value here regardless of whether you use location routing prefixes.
  User extensions should not start with the same number as a location’s steering digit.
- Internal Extension Length - Choose the number of digits for an internal call. You can enter 2-6 digits and the default is 2. After you increase your extension length, existing speed dials to internal extensions are not automatically updated.
- Allow extension dialing between locations - This option allows you to customize the extension dialing between locations based on your organization's requirements. Enable the toggle if your organization doesn’t have duplicate extensions across all its locations. By default, the toggle is enabled. Disable the toggle if your organization has the same extension in different locations. When the toggle is disabled and the caller dials the extension, the call is routed to the user with a matching extension in the same location as the caller. The caller must dial the Enterprise Significant Number (location routing prefix + extension) to reach an extension in other locations.

Configure internal dialing settings for a location

From Control Hub, go to Management and select Locations.
Choose a location from the list and click Calling.
Scroll to Dialing, and then change internal dialing as needed:
- Internal Dialing - Specify the routing prefix that users at other locations need to dial in order to contact someone at this location. The routing prefix of each location must be unique. We recommend that the prefix length matches the length set at the organization level. It must be between 2-7 digits long.
- External Dialing - You can choose an outbound dial digit that users must dial to reach an outside line. If you choose to use this feature, we recommend that you use a different number from your organization's steering digit.
  
  Note: Users can include the outbound dial digit when making external calls to mimic how they dialed on legacy systems. However, all users can still make external calls without the outbound dial digit.
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- (Optional) You can Enforce dialing the outbound dial digit of this location, ensuring that the user must use the outbound dial digit set by the admin to place external calls.
  
  Note: Emergency calls can still be dialed with or without the outbound dial digit when this feature is enabled. Once enabled, any external destination numbers such as those used for call forwarding will no longer work if an outbound dial digit is not included.