Emergency Failover
Keep receiving calls when Shop Commander or your shop's internet cannot — a backup number the phone company rings on its own, with a non-disruptive test.
Emergency failover is the last line of defence for your phone. Routing rules and voicemail cover the everyday case where staff do not answer. Failover covers the rare case where Shop Commander itself cannot take the call: the shop's internet is down, Shop Commander is unreachable, or nobody has the browser phone open anywhere. In that situation the phone company — not Shop Commander — sends the caller straight to a backup number you choose, such as an owner's mobile.
It is configured on its own card at the bottom of Settings → Phone & Messaging. You need the manage emergency failover permission.
Set the backup number
Type the number and press Save backup number. Shop Commander stores it and applies it at the phone company. The status pill shows where things stand:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Ready | The backup is saved, replicated, and confirmed at the phone company. You are covered. |
| Not configured | No backup number yet. If Shop Commander cannot take a call, the caller hears ringing and nothing else. The card shows an amber warning until this is fixed. |
| Degraded | The backup is saved but one routing copy or the phone-company configuration has not confirmed it yet. Shop Commander retries automatically. |
Until a backup is set, the Phone provider card's readiness list also reminds you.
For a Shop Commander-managed line, initial setup and later routing updates are performed through the provider API. Shop staff never create an application, route, or TeXML document in the provider portal. Before a new managed line is reported live, Shop Commander also places its own bounded qualification call and requires signed evidence that both the normal route and the independent emergency route are active.
Test it
The card provides a safe test to run during the day:
- Test failover (calls you) — places a call through the emergency path, exactly as the phone company would during an outage, and rings a number you enter. Customers are not affected. Recent tests and their results are listed on the card so you know when it was last proven to work. Run this test after changing the backup number and during routine continuity checks.
The older two-minute live-routing simulation is unavailable by default. Carrier routing updates can be acknowledged before they reach the call-processing network, and restoration can be delayed too. Operators may explicitly enable it only after validating bounded propagation with Telnyx for the specific account; the non-disruptive test remains the normal verification path.
Using your own phone-provider account
Shop Commander creates and updates the emergency route using the connected account's API credentials. There is no per-shop provider-portal step. An account administrator may still need to create an API credential at the account level before connecting a bring-your-own account.
Desk phones during an outage
Desk phones marked Ring this phone during an outage are included in the emergency path where the provider supports it, so a handset on the counter keeps ringing even when the browser phone cannot.