It seems our clients like the ability to transfer calls by the BLF buttons, but also like the ability to do directed call pickups by pressing a flashing BLF button.
They also like to just hang up attended transfers rather than waiting on the other extension picking up their phone, however, all of these options can inadvertently make an attended transfer call transfer to a call pick up and have two outside calls talking to each other.
Currently, to fix this we have disabled directed call pickup in Class of Service, but the client is reluctant to lose either of these options.
Apart from going back and making his users actually wait for a few seconds before hanging up an attended transfer (to hear if they have just picked up a new incoming call on that extension) is there any other way to restrict the system from transferring an attended transfer to a directed call pickup?
Other issues at these sites are that the receptionist only works half days and when away they want all phones ringing. This is where the issues of calling or transferring calls to other extensions can sometimes pick up a new incoming call just as they press the BLF.
At some point, I know the customer will need to bend, but they have requested their users don’t want to have to learn extension numbers, just use BLFs for everything!
We have tried call pickup, but they want to be able to choose which extension to pick up a call from.
They also don’t want users to wait on other users to pick up transfers, rather leave the phone system to do it all using a ring back dial plan we have built for them.
That is totally incorrect. These is nothing in this type of setup that would some how bridge two PSTN based incoming calls to the system together. I use this type of setup in quite a few customer locations.
You can’t transfer to a call pickup. You can transfer to x200 and then everyone who is BLF’ing x200 will see it ringing and they could pickup the call via Directed Call Pickup by doing **200 (BLF buttons will format generally for you) and then that will pickup the call ringing on x200. So whoever picked up the call, now has that call.
Can you explain how you came to the logic that you could end up joining to outside callers together via Directed Call Pickup/Transfers?
Hi Tom,
We have tested in our office and can confirm we were able to do the same thing. All calls are SIP, we dont have PSTN on these systems.
Example
Call 1 comes in and is answered by extension 200, they ask to talk to ext 201.
Extension 200 presses BLF 201 just as a new call comes in. The new call rings all phones.
Extension 200 in the background has put Call 1 on hold (first part of the attended transfer) and picked up Call 2 via a BLF pickup.
Ext 200 at this point could talk to Call 2 but as they were in the process of just setting their phone down they dont realise an external call is what they have picked up. Call 1 is still on hold.
When they set their phone down, Call 2 gets connected to Call 1 and this is the two external calls talking to each other.
And this is why features such as CID Prefixs and Alert Info (distinctive rings) can be important to this type of setup. All PSTN based calls have distinctive rings. In cases where they park those calls, even the Parking call back has a distinctive ring so they know it’s still a PSTN/parked call.
There are ways to handle this and it’s not going to be a 100% so you need to do things to help minimize what you’re concerned about and marking/denoting the calls can help.
I can confirm, it is possible to blind transfer a call to another inbound caller by using a flashing BLF button. We occasionally get complaints of this in support and it is always the same cause.
Well this is how I see it, and we’ll use Green(Open)/Red(Busy) for examples sake.
So x100 takes a call and needs to transfer it to x200 so they put the call on hold and they are going to hit the BLF button for x200 to call them. Now, is the button Green or Red/Blinking when you go to press it? Because if it is Green the phone will think it’s an available line and attempt to speed dial it. If the line is Red/Blinking then the phone realizes x200 has a call ringing them. If it is Red/Solid then the phone knows x200 is in use.
This is kind of the point of BLF. So that when x100 wants to call x200 they can see the state of x200 so if the user decides to try and hit the BLF button for x200 while it is Red/Blinking (thus indicating a Ringing state) then of course the phone is going to initiate a call pickup if programmed to.
So I think a part of this issue is the fact the users aren’t actually paying attention to the states of their BLF buttons and just blindly pushing them hoping for the desired result.
I completely agree its mainly a user issue, it only happens once in a while, and normally the new call comes in just as their are pressing the BLF button. So the BLF was green and turns red just as they are pressing it.
Unfortunately this client is used to old phone systems where this couldn’t happen etc.
I am just checking if anyone has a technical fix for this before I go back to the client saying their users just need to be more attentive lol