I’m very new to FreePBX, so I might be going about this all wrong. If I am, please point me towards a better solution.
I pay a company to answer my phone calls during the day. They give me a private phone number that I can direct inbound calls to to have them answered. I have the reception company set up with a virtual extension with Follow Me enabled. When their extension is called, the call is immediately (Initial Ring Time is set to 0) sent to the configured Follow Me number, which is the private phone number the company gave me. This works great, but I fear there’s one major issue:
The reception company has their own call queue. If one of my callers is transferred over to the reception company’s Follow Me number and has to wait in their queue for more than 60 seconds, I believe the call is being hung up on because the Ring Time for their extension is set to 60, which is the highest I’ve been able to set it. I’m not certain this is happening, but I’ve noticed a number of calls are hung up while waiting for reception to answer.
At this point, I would provide a call trace to help you determine if calls are actually being hung up on after 60 seconds, or if my suspicion is incorrect, but /var/log/asterisk/full is completely empty and asterisk -rx 'logger show channels' only shows the fail2ban log. What’s strange is that I can still see logs in the FreePBX UI. UPDATE: I found out how to enable logging, which is working now. I’ll go ahead and post a call trace as soon as I notice another call dropped while waiting for a receptionist to answer.
Is there a way to configure the reception extension to ring the Follow Me number indefinitely? Should I be using a queue or something better suited for this?
I’ve considered adding the reception number as a Misc Destination, but there’s no way that I can find that would send the caller to voicemail if the reception company doesn’t answer at all.
I’m using FreePBX 15.0.16.75 with Asterisk 16.11.1
UPDATE: I set the Ring Time setting on the reception extension to 5 seconds and then called the extension to see if I would get transferred to the No Answer destination after 5 seconds of waiting in their queue. I did not, which tells me that the call is considered to be “answered” when I’m waiting in their call queue. In summary, I think my suspicion is incorrect. I’ll go ahead and try to close this topic now. Hopefully my findings will help a fellow newbie like myself out.