New Porting App Feedback

[Rick Guyton]

I mean I could I guess. But why not just ride the port completion notification event and "push the button" for us? Hell I'll let you use my aws Lambda instance.:) I mean cover your ass by saying we need to test and verify it with 933. But help us do right by our customer and make sure they have 911 setup and it's not something we have to remember to come back and do later.

[Darren Schreiber]

Not sure what you mean. In general, when a call comes into the system we have less than 1 second to process the call before we risk the carrier giving up on the call and thinking we're down/not working. Thus we always must avoid any processes that "block" during call processing.

When a number is in "port in" state and the IP is from an outside carrier, we quickly adjust the number document to "in service" because it means the port completed and we know that our system's database queries have to respond in a few milliseconds so there is no risk in requesting a database document update on our side. Thus, we can afford to change the state during inbound call processing.

We also already have an email queueing mechanism locally (postfix) so connecting locally to postfix and queueing an email (even if the email itself takes a while to go out) is quick, so we can do that.

But calling an external API (which is what you're calling "push the button for us") and asking them to update the E911 address information while the call is still being processed requires us to wait for them to reply (and then we record their response for legal paper trail reasons - we have to note that they accepted the address and provisioned it - so we must wait for the reply). That might take longer than a second, thus causing the call to fail. We could potentially build a queueing system that queues E911 update requests so that the call processing just puts something into the queue and they're re-processed later but now you have to build and manage a queueing process for E911 requests, something we don't have today.

So what you're stating as "push the button for us" is a gross over-simplification of the feature request you are asking for, thus driving up engineering work/labor/costs for the whole system for the sake of convenience.

Is it that hard to just re-provision and check 911 after the port completes? I do not think the technical challenge is worth the reward on the automation front.

Another option, it's probably $5k of work to build a queue-based E911 re-provision system and some cost to maintain it. If we did what you're suggesting Rick, would you pay an extra $2 on port completion (one-time) to have it auto-re-provision? We certainly handle 2,500 or more ports a year, so THAT would pay for itself... Then I could see the value here. And $2 seems like a pretty insignificant fee for the assurance you are asking about.

[Rick Guyton]

> Then I could see the value here. And $2 seems like a pretty insignificant fee for the assurance you are asking about.

I certainly can't speak for everyone. But, personally, hell yes. Currently this is what I have to do:

1) Get a temporary number and forward the clients lines to the temp number
2) Set 911 on the temp number
3) On each and every device, set the emergency CID to the temp number and outbound CID to the main number they are porting in. (So that their client's dont' get their temp number and 911 works right)
4) Submit Port. Wait until I get the porting email...
5) Request numbers to be put into the account. Wait...
6) Once support pre-populates the number, go into SmartPBX/AdvCall and put the pre-populated number into the callflow. So that calls will completed when porting completes.
7) Wait for port completion.
8) Setup 911 on the real number once port completes.
9) Go remove the device settings I put in in step 3.
10) Remove temp number from call flows/delete it.

So with the combination of your $2/number service & immediately getting numbers when the port is submitted. This is my new setup procedure:

1) Submit a porting doc and immediatly get my pre-populated numbers.
2) Configure everything right from the start. 911/callflows/everything
3) Stick a temporary number in SmartPbx/AdvCall to get inbound calling working
4) Remove the temporary number at my leasure after porting completes.

EDIT: I mean, Maybe even charge $5 for the option to pre-provision 911. That way those of us who find value in it, can pay for the convenience and those that are in a position of needing to watch ever nickel and dime can. An you guys only need 1/2 of us to pick the option.

EDIT2: and honestly, I'd like to pretend like I'm a perfect robot executing my current procedure. But I know I miss stuff. It's just too much to keep track of. I've forgotten to apply the numbers to smartpbx once support pre-populated them and cause my client an outage when port completed. And I know there plenty of numbers that were temporary at one point. But I can't remember for sure if they were temporary or not now. Just two or three of those forgotten temp numbers would pay for it

[Darren Schreiber]

This is very helpful feedback, thank you. Let me discuss again with the team.

[Logicwrath]

It would be great if we could have a recurring phone meeting or webinar once a month or quarter where we have the opportunity to provide feedback.  I am sure there is a huge amount of feedback we could provide that is not getting put on these forums.

I see this as an opportunity for re-sellers and community members to submit their most important concerns or issues.  I would gladly join a recurring discussion and communicate the items that are most important to me.

Another thought, could be a monthly/quarterly recurring thread requesting feedback.  This would work even better with a reddit style voting system where top issues get upvoted.  If you were requesting the feedback, I suspect more partners would provide it as they would not feel like they are complaining.  It would be more of an open discussion.  It would also give 2600 the chance to respond and/or fix any misconceptions.

I think something like this would strengthen vendor/client relationship and help steer innovations/improvements that the community wants most.

Just a thought.

[Darren Schreiber]

This is already in progress.

1) The monthly webinars. The next one is already announced, you should sign up. We'll use half the webinar to present a topic we think is going to be interesting, and the other half for Q&A on, well, pretty much anything. You should have already received a notice about the next one. We did these last year toward the end of the year but stopped when we got too busy with 4.0 launch but frankly they were supposed to have stayed at once a month. We just only had so many staff to plan them (and they take a LOT of planning). But we intend to pick them back up and keep them consistent. Please do come to those!

2) Re: up-votes, I intend to bring back JIRA's voting system and use loyalty points to allow people to "spend" the points on votes. We are working on such a system. Your points are based on your contributions to the product and/or forums (you earn points for helping others) and/or the amount you contribute financially.

[Rick Guyton]

> This is very helpful feedback, thank you.

Sure about that? I feel like I'm a PITA for you guys sometimes (most times). Lol

[Darren Schreiber]

Your suggestions are always welcome. They are taken seriously.

I will note that many suggestions focus around "small things." May seem glaring to you but overall they won't move us as a company, or you as a reseller frankly, forward in the market in the long-term. If we spent all our time on the suggestions you note, we would probably have an amazing set of existing features while falling completely behind on new features.

So, like most things in life, there's a balance. It means nobody is ever perfectly happy, but we progress on the "small stuff" and the "big stuff" at the same time, based on resource availability.

Thus, we won't always be able to fix the "things that make resellers lives easier" features without also scheduling things that people aren't even necessarily asking us about yet but are probably 1+ years worth of work so we need to be strategic and get them started.

This particular conversation revolves around porting. Today, we spend $82,000 a year processing ports (just processing them). This number is too high based on our volume. I'd estimate we port-in about 10,000 numbers annually, so that's $8.20/port (we charge you $5/port). So, clearly a problem. Hence, the energy is now on porting. Thus, if we can pair the feedback with the financial goals and the overall objectives of porting in general (i.e. fixing both nuisance and functionally broken items), then everyone wins.

So we take your feedback to heart, figure out it's cost + value, measure it amongst other cost/value scenarios, and go from there. That's why we don't provide ETAs, those values change often frankly. But they do eventually get done.

[Rick Guyton]

Just FYI, a lot of the things I bring up are intentionally small stuff. Because I don't want to burden you guys with anything that I can do myself. It's a credit to your platform and why I love it really. All of the big stuff I want to do, I already have 99.99% of the ability to do now. There's just some sticking points here and there. I'll use the building analogy you gave at KazooCon. I'm effectually asking you the bare minimum I need. I'm not telling you that I'm building a waterpark with a wave pool on the 5th floor. I'm telling you I need 10 more PSI in the pipes, 10,000 lbs more support in the floor and a 6 inch drain pipe for my floor. :)

The whole reason I brought this thread up is that I want to build a rapid onboarding tool for us. There's so much to do when making a new account especially if the new account has multiple locations. But almost all of this can be boiled down to an excel spreadsheet. My vision is to be able to onboard any account under 100 phones and 3 locations in a day by importing the sheet, drop shipping the phones and going onsite to train. To get where I want to go, I can't keep chugging away setting everything up with a macro recorder that literally copy/pastes from an excel sheet and clicks buttons like I have been doing. And mentally keeping track for a dozen different steps and where each location is in each. Making the numbers available immediately upon port request allows me to set everything up instantaneously. And being able to pre-provision 911 removes a ton of logic that I need to apply otherwise. Additionally, this will be hugely helpful to many people even if they aren't using my app.

[Karl Stallknecht]

Ditto to pretty much 100% of what Rick has been saying in this thread :-)

[Rick Guyton]

Where's the webinar signup? I didn't see any thing come across from eventbright.