AI Frontdesk: Managing escalated call forwarding and contacts

Valid for AI Receptionist (packages from August 19, 2026). (Momentum AI)

Your assistant cannot resolve every inquiry on their own. To ensure they put callers through to the right person in such cases, save your points of contact as contacts and describe in your own words when a call should be forwarded – for example, invoicing queries to the accounts department. The same contact can also receive the summaries that your assistant sends by email after a call. This feature is available in the AI Receptionist product. The following steps show you how to create contacts and set up call forwarding.

Open the assistant’s settings

Log in to your IONOS account.
Click on Menu > AI Frontdesk in the title bar.
In the contract overview, click on Manage in the tile for the contract you want.

Open the Contacts, Call Forwarding & Email Summary section. This is where you can configure all the following settings.

Create contacts

In the upper section of this area, you can specify the people to whom your assistant should forward calls or send summaries. Create these contacts before you set up the forwarding rules – only then will there be recipients you can refer to.

Click on Add contact. The Add contact window will open.
Enter the person’s Name, Department (e.g. Accounts) and a brief Description.
If the person is to receive calls, enter their telephone number in the Call forwarding field and tick the box next to Enable call forwarding.
If the person is to receive summaries, enter their email address in the Email summary field and tick the box next to Receive conversation summary via email.
Click Apply. Click Cancel or the × in the top right-hand corner to close the window without creating the contact.
Repeat the process for all other contacts.

Please Note

Avoid an endless loop: Do not redirect calls back to a number that is already being forwarded to your assistant. Use a separate phone number for call forwarding.

Contacts you have created appear in a list below, with columns for Name, Department, Call forwarding, Email summary, and Actions. Clicking the ··· (ellipsis menu) icon in the Actions column opens a menu at the right-hand edge of the row, containing the options Edit, Duplicate, and Delete.

Notes

The interface carries out duplication and deletion without prompting you for confirmation – so the contact will either disappear from the list immediately or appear twice. However, neither action takes effect until you save your changes (see Save changes). If you have deleted the wrong contact, do not save.
Telephone numbers and email addresses are independent of one another. If you enter both, the same person will receive calls and also receive the summaries. To find out what these summaries contain and where you can view them, please read the article Setting up email summaries.
If you also use the AI Chat Assistant, the Department and Description fields have a secondary function: they help your assistant identify which inquiries the person is responsible for, and suggest the appropriate contact to visitors in the chat. If both fields are left blank, your assistant will not offer to transfer the chat to that contact. To find out how to enable this transfer, see the article Setting up and integrating the website widget.

Set up call forwarding

In the lower part of this section, under Call forwarding instructions, you can specify the circumstances in which your assistant should put a call through to one of your contacts. You can enter the condition in a text field using natural language, just as you would explain it to a member of staff.

All call forwarding rules are entered together in this single field. If you set up several rules, specify the recipient using the department you have entered for the relevant contact. This ensures there is no ambiguity as to which contact is meant.

Examples:

“Forward calls regarding invoices to the accounts department.”
“Forward calls regarding discounts to the sales department.”

Save changes

To apply your changes, click the Save changes button in the top right-hand corner. As long as you haven’t made any changes, the button will be greyed out and labelled No changes.

If you have already embedded the website widget on your website, your saved changes will be automatically applied there – there is no need to embed it again. It may take a few minutes for the changes to become visible to all visitors.

To test your settings, have a conversation with the assistant. There are two ways to do this:

Via your website: Open your website and start a conversation via the website widget. If you haven’t integrated the widget yet, first follow the guide Setting up and integrating the website widget.
Via a test call: If you have subscribed to AI Receptionist, call the assistant directly from the interface – using the green Test Call button in the top right-hand corner. If you have made any changes, the button will say Save & Call and will save your changes at the same time. Test calls are free of charge. You can find further details in the article Making a test call.