What is the Exotel Chrome plugin?


As you may be aware, Exotel allows making outbound calls from your Exotel dashboard. Extending this feature, the Exotel chrome plugin provides a way for you to make outbound calls from any webpage that you are browsing. With this plugin you can now make calls from your CRM web-page or a google spreadsheet without having to copy-paste the number and call from the exotel dashboard!


If you use the "Chrome" browser, you could get the app from the Google Chrome webstore. Here's the link. 


Once you have installed the plugin, it will appear on the top right corner of your browser like this:



Logging in

To start making calls from the chrome plugin, you would need to login to your Exotel dashboard.


Making calls

Once you have installed the plugin and have logged into your Exotel account you are all set.

Whenever you view any webpage, the plugin automatically detects the phone numbers on the page and places a small green phone icon just before the number. Like this:



Now, Clicking on the Call button will initiate an outbound call to the highlighted number. Once the call is initiated, you will see a fleeting notification on the top left corner of the page confirming that the call has been placed.


Note:

If you have multiple virtual numbers in your account, the default virtual number (the one from which you made the last outbound call) will be used for making the call.


Disabling auto detection of phone numbers


Sometimes the auto-detection feature may not be helpful while reading certain web pages. For eg: A google spreadsheet full of 10 digit numbers which are not phone numbers. In such cases you may want to disable the auto-detection. To do this just un-check the option like this:



FAQs

1) I installed the plugin but phone numbers are not being detected
This could be due to a couple of reasons
  • Try reloading the page and check if the numbers are detected now. The plugin detects phone numbers only when loading the page. Pages loaded before the plugin is installed or when the plugin was disabled will not highlight phone numbers
  • The number could be represented in a way that the plugin did not understand. The plugin detects most standard representations of phone numbers like 098862XXXXX, +9198862XXXX , 080-3233XXX etc. If there is a standard representation and the plugin still did not detect do let us know.