Several times since migrating to PBXact, customer calls have ended up being transferred to our pager. The pager is a Valcom unit interfaced through a Cisco SPA3104, which in turn is connected to our network and linked to the PBX via a SIP trunk/outbound route. When this happens, the customer does not know they are on our paging system and the only way to get the customer off our overhead speakers is to go downstairs to physically unplug the SPA - there’s no way for one of our users to pick up the call after it’s been transferred.
Our operator wants me to ‘prevent any call from being transferred to the pager’. I explained to him that a transfer to the phone system is really placing an existing call on hold and placing a new call to the pager, then connecting the two & disconnecting the phone so if I stop calls from being able to be transferred to the pager, it would stop anyone from being able to call it; I don’t think he got it. (Not 100% on this - I pieced it together from how I’ve observed the phone behaving & what’s in the CDRs for transfers.)
One idea I had was to create a password on the outbound route, so everyone would have to push something to confirm they want to page, but he thinks this will create more headaches than it is worth.
This is clearly a user training issue, but they’re looking for a technical solution to it. My ideas, some of which I don’t know if they’re even possible and would like input on, are:
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Is there indeed any way to prevent transfers to a specific extension/route/trunk?
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Is there any way of setting a maximum number of seconds for calls to a specific extension/route/trunk? (While this would not prevent this from happening, it would mitigate the effect of it because it’d drop the person off the overhead after n seconds.)
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Any other ideas at all? Really grasping at straws here…
