Core concepts and vocabulary
The words Steer Phones uses for the pieces of a phone system — phone systems, extensions, phones, call groups, call menus, time periods, and the records a call leaves behind.
A handful of words carry most of the meaning in a phone system, and several of them name things that are easy to confuse — an extension is not a phone, a reporting group is not a routing link, and a call menu is not a call group. This page defines each term once, in the sense Steer Phones uses it, so the rest of the documentation reads the way it was meant to.
Phone system
A phone system is one business’s phone setup, and it is the boundary everything else sits inside. Its numbers, extensions, phones, greetings, schedule, routing, voicemail, and call records all belong to exactly one phone system.
That boundary is the reason a business with several locations normally runs one phone system per location: each site keeps its own numbers, its own greetings, and its own hours, and a change made at one site cannot alter another. Nothing reaches across the boundary unless two phone systems have been deliberately linked.
A phone system also carries the settings that apply to everything in it — the business name callers and assistants hear, the time zone every schedule is measured in, the default caller ID, and the fallback to use when routing runs out of options.
Extensions, phones, and users
These three are the terms most often used interchangeably, and they are three different things.
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Extension | An internal dialing address, such as 101. It is where a call is sent, not what it rings |
| Phone | A provisioned device — a desk phone, softphone, cordless base or handset, or a speaker |
| User | A person with a sign-in, holding a role that decides what they may see and change |
An extension can ring several phones at once, and a phone answers at most one extension. Pairing a desk phone with a softphone, or a cordless base with its handsets, is a supported arrangement rather than a duplicate: each device keeps its own identity and its own button layout, so it stays individually addressable even while sharing an extension number with another device.
An extension with no phones assigned never rings, and that is useful rather than broken: it becomes a routing hub. The extension number can be published on a card or a website, and where calls to it actually land is changed in one place, without anyone having to learn a new number.
A user may be linked to an extension, which is what lets that person see their own calls and voicemail, but a user is not an extension and an extension is not a device.
Desk phones also carry programmable buttons beyond the dial pad. A busy-lamp (BLF) button watches a colleague’s line and shows whether it is free, ringing, or in use; other buttons park a call, start hold music, or open voicemail. Message-waiting indication (MWI) is what lights the phone when a new message is waiting in its mailbox.
Call groups and call menus
Both are destinations — places a call can be sent — and both do nothing until something points a call at them.
A call group is a set of extensions that ring together. Every assigned extension rings at the same time, for one timeout that belongs to the group, and the group has its own unanswered route and its own mailbox. A call group is a simultaneous ring, not a sequence.
A call menu is the greeting-and-keypad step, the thing usually called an IVR. It plays a greeting, waits for the caller to press a key, and runs the actions mapped to that digit — playing audio, sending a text message, then sending the caller on to an extension, a group, another menu, an assistant, or a mailbox. Keypad presses reach the phone system as DTMF tones, which is why a menu asks for a digit rather than a spoken answer. A menu also decides what to do when the caller presses nothing at all.
Menus nest: a digit on one menu can lead to another menu, so a business can build a tree as shallow or as deep as it wants. The practical limit is the caller’s patience, not the product’s.
Time periods and schedules
Routing is configured per time period, so these three terms decide when a setting applies.
- A time period is a named state of the business day — Open Hours, Lunch, Closed. Periods are what routing is written against: each number gets one action per period.
- The weekly schedule maps windows of each weekday to a time period, so the phone system knows which period it is in at any moment. Time not covered by any window falls to a designated default period.
- A date override covers a specific date — a holiday, a half day, a one-off closure — and takes priority over the weekly schedule. An override can repeat on the same date each year.
Every one of those comparisons is made in the phone system’s own time zone, not the reader’s, so a schedule means the same thing to a caller across the country as it does to the person who wrote it.
Organizations, locations, and linked phone systems
A phone system can stand alone or belong to an organization, the parent that holds several of a business’s phone systems together. Two separate things then become possible, and mistaking one for the other is a common source of confusion.
- Reporting groups sort an organization’s phone systems into named buckets — a region, a brand, a district — so a portfolio view can be totalled and filtered by group. Grouping is purely a reporting device. It never changes how a call is routed.
- Linked phone systems federate systems so their members can reach each other. Routing gains a destination on another system, and people can dial across the link directly. Each system still keeps its own numbers, extensions, greetings, schedule, and records; once a call arrives at the other system, that system’s settings run it from there.
The two are independent, so two locations can sit in the same reporting group and still have no way to send each other a call, or be linked for routing without being compared in the same rollup.
Recordings, transcripts, and analysis
Every call leaves a call record — who called, when, in which direction, how it ended, and the route it took through the phone system. Three further artifacts can hang off that record, each built from the one before it:
- A recording of the audio, when recording is enabled for the phone system and that call is not covered by an exemption.
- A transcript produced from the recording, with each side of the conversation labelled where the transcription can distinguish speakers.
- Analysis derived from the transcript — a category, a sentiment reading, a short summary, a business outcome, and scores against the scorecards a business has defined.
Because each stage follows the previous one, they arrive in order and can lag it. A call can be playable before it has been transcribed, and transcribed before it has been scored, so an empty panel usually means “not yet” rather than “never happened”. Very short recordings are not transcribed at all.
Voicemail follows the same path: a recorded message is transcribed and analyzed like any other recording, and the result is mirrored onto the record of the call that produced it.
AI-produced categories, summaries, sentiment, and scores are review aids. They speed up finding the calls worth listening to; they are not a substitute for the recording or the transcript when a decision matters.