Live Call Routing (LCR) is a great way to give your customers or internal team the ability to connect directly with an on call engineer. While this might work great during business hours, it isn’t always optimal at 3am.

You could restrict your schedule so that your team is only on call during business hours, but then if someone calls in after hours they’ll receive an error message—because nobody is currently on call—and won’t be prompted to leave a voicemail. PagerDuty won’t trigger an incident either, as there isn’t anyone to assign the incident to at this time. If only there was a way to prompt callers to connect directly during business hours and leave a voicemail after hours…

We’ve come up with a workaround where you can now configure an LCR phone number to connect directly during business hours and prompt callers to leave a voicemail after hours.

Configure your on call schedule:

• First, you’ll want to set up a “dummy” user in your account and set them up with a fake phone number (ex. 415-555-5555). This user is your “after hours” user.
• Next, set up your on call schedule so that your engineers are on call during business hours and this “dummy” user is on call after hours.
• Add your schedule—or schedules—to an escalation policy. If you’re using a few different schedules, just be sure that your “dummy” user is consistently on call after hours.

Configure your LCR number:

• Create a new service in PagerDuty and associate your newly created escalation policy with this service.
• Create a new LCR number and set it up to “Connect Directly”.
• Attach this new number to the PagerDuty service you just created and save.

Voila! You now have an LCR number that will connect callers directly during business hours and prompt them to leave a voicemail if they call in after hours. Leaving a voicemail will trigger an incident against your service that you can then address when your team gets back into the office the next day.