The name may scare away some, but obviously not you. First, let me commend your bravery.

So what are phantom extensions and how are they used?

A phantom extension is a way to have a user/group/voicemail in your phone system without having a physical phone for that extension.  

There is a great deal of flexibility using this feature, I will share with you some of the ways this comes in handy for customers.

In general, sales people use phantom extensions often because they are always on the road. They can just have their calls go to a voicemail that they check every so often (or use email notification).  They can also setup the phantom extension to just route their calls to their cell #.

So although they are available in the auto attendant and have a company voicemail, there is no physical phone at the office for the sales person.

We have other customers who are interested in an Xblue X16, but since you can only route calls to a single extension and not to a group -we recommend going to a Response Point system and using a phantom extension to ring a group. This way they stay in the same price range and have the ability to setup groups.

I will explain the previous in more detail. Let’s say for example you have a sales group and you want to certain extensions to ring when there is a sales call. You can setup a user in the admin program as Sales, and give it whatever extension # you want. You would setup this user, Sales, to ring the desired extensions of your sales team (ex: 102, 105, 107).

You can record your Response Point auto attendant greeting to say "for sales, say sales" when the customer says sales it will ring the desired extensions as a group. If they do not answer, you have a few options. You can have the call go back to the Auto Attendant, or you can have the Sales user voicemail answer.

It is important to keep in mind that there is no phone for the Sales user so people must check that mailbox periodically or use voicemail to email notification.

I’ve only mentioned a few ways that this feature can be used, but there are more depending on your preference.