Shared Line Appearance (SLA)
You and your team can monitor other extensions and answer calls on each other’s behalf with Shared Line Appearance (SLA).
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What is Shared Line Appearance?
Shared Line Appearance (SLA) is a tool that allows employees to monitor the phones of other users on the account (similar to a busy lamp field functionality) and also lets them pick up or park those calls as desired.
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With Shared Line Appearance, employees can easily monitor other extensions, answer incoming calls for other team members, or even place outgoing calls through other extensions. Thanks to advanced call handling options like Call Park and Call Flip, team members can easily step in when a colleague is away from their phone.
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If your office thrives on teamwork, Vonage’s Shared Line Appearance feature can give your team an additional boost, helping your team manage phone traffic more easily and efficiently.
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How does Shared Line Appearance (SLA) work?
With Vonage’s Shared Line Appearance, users can monitor and manage other extensions from a single view on their desk phone. Users can answer calls on other extensions when their colleagues are away — or put calls on hold for another user to pick up — simply by pressing the extension number on their own phone.
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Team members can even place calls from other extensions by selecting the extension and dialing a number. This makes Shared Line Appearance a powerful tool not only for teams, but also for personal and administrative assistants, who can use SLA to monitor employee calls and answer, park, or transfer them on an employee’s behalf.
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Benefits of Shared Line Appearance
Shared Line Appearance makes it easier for your team to achieve true collaboration. Key benefits include:
Handle calls as a team — Shared Line Appearance lets you meet customer expectations better and cut down on missed calls. Shared Line Appearance offers an easy way to increase call visibility across teams and organizations. With this feature, employees can support one another with incoming calls and handle customer communications as a team.
Fewer missed connections — Increase call visibility and teamwork across your organization. With a shared line, VoIP users can easily monitor and answer each others’ extensions. That means fewer missed calls when team members are busy, away from their desk, or out of office.
Easily manage calls — Provide more call-handling options to enhance service and streamline operations. Shared Line Appearance works with other VBC features to give your team more call-handling options. Employees can park, flip, or answer incoming calls to other users at the press of a button.
Perfect for assistants — In addition to teams, this feature is perfect for personal and administrative assistants who help manage incoming calls. Admin assistants can easily monitor phone traffic and manage calls on behalf of other employees.
How to use Shared Line Appearance
Shared Line Appearance (SLA) lets you monitor, answer, and place calls of selected extensions from your desk phone. Only Super Users and Administrators can set up SLA in the Admin Portal. Here’s how:
Sign in to the Admin Portal.
Click Phone System, then click Line Appearance.
Click Add Line Appearance, then select the extension that will monitor SLA, the device assigned to the extension, and other options.
Click Save.
Unplug the power cord from your phone and wait 10 seconds before you plug it back in. Your phone and/or expansion module now displays the extensions you chose to monitor.
Still have questions about VBC Shared Line Appearance?
Shared Line Appearance is a standard feature of Vonage Business Communications and comes at no additional cost for VBC customers.
Shared Line Appearance allows you to monitor other extensions from the Line Appearance view. Each extension will display when the line is busy and when it receives an incoming call.
Use these steps to modify an existing SLA or remove it from use completely:
      1. Sign in to the Admin Portal.
      2. Click Phone System, then click Line Appearance.
      3. Hover over the extension you want to manage, then select your option: To edit, click the Pencil icon to adjust settings; to remove, click the Trash icon, then unplug the power cord from your phone and wait 10 seconds before you plug it back in.
Using Shared Line Appearance, you can answer calls to other extensions directly from the Line Appearance view. When an extension receives a call, simply select the extension to answer the call on your phone.
When you set up Line Appearance, you’ll be prompted to choose between Shared Line Appearance and Busy Lamp Field. Both of these features let users monitor other extensions, but Shared Line Appearance offers added functionality.
The key difference is that Busy Lamp Field only shows you the status of each extension. In addition to displaying the extension status, Shared Line Appearance allows users to answer calls, place calls, and put calls on hold for other extensions.
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Get started with Shared Line Appearance (SLA)
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