How Routing Works

Overview

Routing is how one part of your hotline hands the caller to the next. A menu key pointing at an audio player, a message box pointing back at the main menu, a phone number pointing at your front door: every one of those connections is a route. You set them in one place, a dropdown labelled Destination, and the same dropdown looks the same everywhere in the app.

The Destination dropdown

Wherever a route can be set, you get a section called Routing (some pages call it Next destination, Afterwards, or name the moment, like Post-Recording Routing) with a single field inside it:

• Destination — one searchable dropdown, placeholder "Where should the call go?". It lists everything in your account, grouped by kind: a colored heading for Menu, one for Audio player, one for Message box, and so on, with every item of that kind underneath. Pick the item, not the type. Categories you have nothing in are left out of the list.
• Clear Routing — a red button that appears once a destination is set. It asks you to confirm, then empties the route so nothing happens at that point any more.

On the My Hotline builder the same picker appears inside the ⚙ settings slide-over, under a section called Afterwards ("Where the caller goes when this finishes"). For Go to, Join a list, and Leave a list, the destination sits at the top of the panel instead, because sending the caller onward is the whole point of those blocks.

Tip: if the destination you pick is a Message box, a second field appears right underneath, Save messages into, so you can choose which audio player keeps those messages without leaving the panel.

What you can route to

These are the kinds of destinations the dropdown offers, with the plain words the app uses:

Merchants are not a destination. A merchant is the payee behind a Payment block, set up on the Payments & Payouts page.

Where the call enters

Every call starts at one of two entrances, and both carry a single route:

• A phone number — the Virtual Number form calls this route Where calls to this number go.
• A test PIN — the shared dial-in line plus your PIN, for testing before you own a number. See Phone Numbers & Test PIN.

Both use the route key default. If the entrance is not routed anywhere, opening My Hotline quietly creates a menu called Main Menu and points the entrance at it.

Named routes for each block

Besides keypad digits, most blocks have one or more named routes: the moments where the caller finishes and has to go somewhere. These are the names as the builder shows them.

Some full resource pages use older wording for the same routes. The Access check page labels them When Success and When Validation Fails; the Exam page uses When Passed, When Failed, and When the exam is closed. They are the same routes the builder names in plain words.

The Audio player's extra routes

An audio player's full page splits its routing into two moments, because a caller can be listening to a recording or standing in the player's pick-a-recording menu:

• While Listening to Audio — Audio Playback Actions (a key while a recording plays), When Audio Library is Empty, When Audio Playback Ends.
• When Listening to Main Menu (hidden for the Play everything type) — Menu Actions (a key in the pick list), When Menu is Empty, When No Input Received, When No Match Found.

The builder and the scheduler only surface If there are no recordings yet; the rest live on the Audio Player page.

Keys callers can press

On a menu, a route can be attached to any of these:

• The twelve physical keys: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 * #.
• Longer codes — a route whose key is more than one digit, like 12 or 101. Callers type the whole code. These do not fit on the keypad picture, so My Hotline lists them under the keypad as "Longer codes on this menu".
• The two named menu routes, If the caller presses nothing and If the caller presses a wrong key.

One key is spoken for: if Callers can press a key to go back is on in Account Settings, that key (*, #, 0, 7, 8, or 9) returns the caller to the previous menu anywhere in the hotline. On the builder's keypad it shows as a Back tile until you give it a route of its own.

Unreachable blocks

Nothing in your account is live until a caller can actually walk to it. The app works this out by tracing routes backwards from a block until it hits a phone number or a test PIN. If no such path exists, the block is unreachable:

• On a block's full settings page, the location chips read "Not connected to a phone number yet — callers can't reach this."
• In the builder's Which one? dropdown, an unreachable item shows call flow: none yet under its name.
• More → Clean up on My Hotline lists every unreachable block and offers to delete them all in one go.

An unreachable block is not broken, just parked. Point a key at it and it becomes part of the flow again.

Jumping from a page back to the keypad

Every full settings page shows Where callers reach this: one colored chip trail per path, starting with the phone number and showing each key pressed along the way, for example ☎ 1-7-8. Click a menu chip and you land on My Hotline at that exact spot, using a link like ?number=3&goto=1,7. The builder presses those keys for you and opens the menu you clicked.

Changing a route on a schedule

A route does not have to stay put. A scheduled task using the action Change where a menu key / route goes can re-point any of the routes above at a chosen time, and pairing two tasks (morning and evening) switches a key back and forth day after day.

Tips

• Give everything a clear name before you wire it. The Destination dropdown shows names, not types, and names have to be unique across your account anyway.
• Always set If the caller presses nothing on your main menu. Without it, a caller who says nothing hears silence.
• Dead ends are allowed. If the last block has no route, the call simply ends.
• When something is connected in several places, deleting it empties every one of them. The confirmation tells you how many.