Call Pickup

Overview

Call Pickup lets you answer a colleague’s ringing phone from your own desk — no need to walk over, no missed call. Two flavors are available:

• Directed Pickup — answer a specific extension that’s ringing (you know whose phone it is).
• Group Pickup — answer any phone ringing inside your pickup group, without needing to know the extension.

Both work straight from your IP phone’s dial pad using a Feature Access Code (FAC). Some desk phones can also pick up a call with a single press of a BLF button.

Note: Your administrator decides which extensions belong to your pickup group — this page is for using pickup once it’s configured. For the configuration side, see Call Pickup (Tenant Admin).

Directed Pickup — Answering a Specific Extension

When a colleague’s phone is ringing and you know their extension, dial:

*971001

The default FAC is *97 followed by the extension number. The ringing call is transferred straight to your phone and you can speak with the caller immediately.

Examples:

Directed Pickup works across the whole tenant — the target extension does not need to be in the same pickup group as you. You only need to know the number.

Tip: If you pick up a wrong call by mistake, just transfer it back. See the call-transfer page for the FAC.

Group Pickup — Answering Anyone in Your Group

When you don’t know which extension is ringing — or several phones are ringing at once — dial:

*98

That’s it. No extension number needed. VeloPBX answers the longest-ringing call in your pickup group and connects it to your phone.

Example: You’re in the open-plan office and a phone is ringing somewhere on the sales row. All sales agents share a pickup group. You dial *98 and the call comes to you.

Note: If more than one phone is ringing in the group at the same moment, the system answers the call that has been ringing the longest — the most likely one to be missed.

Pickup with a BLF Key

Many desk phones (Yealink, Fanvil, Grandstream, Snom, Cisco, etc.) have programmable side keys that can be configured as BLF (Busy Lamp Field) buttons monitoring a colleague’s extension.

When that colleague’s phone is ringing, the BLF LED flashes. To pick up the call:

1. Wait for the BLF LED to flash (incoming call on the monitored extension).
2. Press the BLF key once.
3. The call is answered on your phone.

This is the fastest way to pick up — one press, no codes.

Tip: If your phone doesn’t have BLF keys configured for the people you usually cover, ask your administrator to provision them. Most reception/assistant setups benefit hugely from a row of BLF keys.

A Worked Example

The reception desk at extension 101 is at lunch. From your office, you hear it ringing through the open door. You don’t want the caller to drop into voicemail.

1. You pick up your handset (or press the speaker key).
2. You dial *97101 and press the dial/send key.
3. The call moves from reception to your phone — you greet the caller, take a message, and tell them you’ll have reception call back after lunch.

Total time: about three seconds. The caller never knew they were forwarded.

Tips

• Don’t pick up calls that aren’t yours to handle. A ringing line might be a private call, a personal matter, or a customer who specifically asked for that person. Use pickup for shared coverage scenarios — reception, sales floor, support team — not to intercept individual calls.
• Group Pickup vs. Directed Pickup — when the same call is ringing inside your group, both 98 and 97 will work. Group Pickup is faster when you don’t know the extension; Directed is precise when you do.
• FAC codes are tenant-specific. The codes above (97, 98) are the VeloPBX defaults; your administrator may have customized them. If a code doesn’t behave as described, check with your admin or email [email protected].
• Pickup respects ringing only. Once a call is connected (the colleague has answered), you can no longer pick it up — you’d need a different feature, such as call park retrieval or barge-in.

Next Step

→ Voicemail

Last updated: 2026-05-01