Automate Call Forwarding when Customer's Internet is Down?

[Marie]

Automate Call Forwarding when Customer's Internet is Down?

Our customer is asking us to set auto call forwarding if their internet is down.  They want to have calls to their main number automatically transfer to another number if their internet is down.

Is this possible?  Anyone doing this?

Thanks for any input.

Marie

[Michael D]

Marie, you can associate a landline or mobile device to the phone where calls ring in. Or create a find me follow me .

[Travis Hawkins]

How will the system determine if the customer's Internet is down?

[Michael D]

Maybe more of, the primary device is not registered any longer so the call goes to an alternate device (landline, cell phone, etc)

[Travis Hawkins]

Good thought Michael. I suppose that might work in a scenario where the main number routes to a single phone, but we have lots of customers whose main number routes to a ring group. Maybe we would just have to be selective about which customers we enabled this feature for.

[Karl Stallknecht]

I'm sure this is possible, but it would be difficult to build. Here is my logic:

You can enable loss of registration emails to send to you every time the phone loses registration. You could send these emails to a script on a server and if you write some sort of script that looks at the percentage of loss of registration emails for the account's devices, you could then have it trigger an API to change a call flow. Of course you'd want to have it double check that the phones haven't all come back online after x minutes, since a brief power outage for example might cause you to receive loss of registration emails for every device even though the devices all come back online minutes later. You would also need to have it check every x minutes to see if the devices had re-registered and thus revert the call flow.

All of this is doable as far as I can see, but just difficult and would have a lot of moving parts.

What we do is just have the loss of registration emails get sent into our staff email that is monitored 24/7 and we open a support ticket with the customer asking what to do if we see emails for all of their devices and they are still offline when we check the registrations in Kazoo/Monster. We thought that the "automatic" failover to a cell phone would be a great idea, but it turns out that it wasn't as practical as it seems on the surface:

1. More often than not the customer will say to just ignore it if it's close to the end of the day or the customer won't care since an answering service will answer the calls as per their regular callflow setup. Keep in mind if the devices are ALL offline (even in a ring group) then it will skip them and go to the next step instantly, so in the case of an answering service it will go straight to the answering service.

2. Often times the cell phone number that calls should be forwarded to will change depending on who is working that day, meaning you never really know whose cell phone the calls should go to and you need to check with the customer first.

3. If the customer has no power or no Internet, they often times don't want to answer the phones because they can't do anything after answering them (i.e. look up an order, make an appointment, etc) since their Internet and/or power is down. So they are out of business even if they CAN answer the phone.

4. Any sort of automatic system could be annoying and go back and forth if the Internet was "flaky" one day. Thus some calls would go to a cell phone and some would go to the desk phone. It's better for this reason to just manually turn it on or off, unless you wrote something to manually turn it on and then require human intervention to turn it off. But again, very minor blips could trigger the forwarding which would get annoying if the customer had to keep contacting someone to disable it.

[Darren Schreiber]

For SIP phones, there is a hidden flag in the API that allows failing over to the call-forward number if a phone is not registered. I can see if we can expose this in the GUI.

Basically, how it works is that any time a phone's SIP creds are looked up and there is no registration present, we instead utilize a bridge string that dials the "forward" number. This is tricky though - it's a flag to say basically "if no phone is registered, use the call-forward number instead". Which means it will use whatever number was last forwarded to, if the client plays with call forwarding.

So, this would probably do what you want, as long as the customer doesn't randomly change their call-forwarding number.

Also, the registration has to have expired. The easiest talk track to your client in this case is "your phone will failover if your internet is down within 360 seconds of the internet failing. It does take a few minutes for the failover to kick in."

[Karl Stallknecht]

Darren: does this automatically shut off when the phone re-registers?

[Darren Schreiber]

Yes. It does not "turn on" forwarding. The logic is as follows:

Request to ring user -> Is call forwarding enabled? (No) -> Is phone registered? (No) -> Is failover flag set? (Yes) -> Ring Call-Forward Number

[Karl Stallknecht]

Thanks, that makes a lot more sense. When will it timeout (i.e. would it end up going to the cell phone's voicemail or does it only ring for 15-20 seconds or something)?

[Rick Guyton]

Here's how we've done it before... I'm not sure if it works anymore as our only client that required it went out of business. We'd setup a ring group with 5 difference devices all 0 delay, 26 second ring time. Then, we'd setup a cellular device as a 6th option with a 40 second delay and a 25 second ring time. Finally, we'd setup a timeout on the ring group itself of 25 seconds ( Don't think this is exposed in the GUI anymore, but you can get at it via API) In normal operation, the group would ring the 5 phones, then the ring group timer would time out, so the cell would never ring. BUT if ALL devices in the ring group were de-registered, the ring group would skip them and start ringing the cell phone.

It's been a while since Iv'e needed to do this, but it DID work at one point... Give it a whirl.

[Karl Stallknecht]

Very good idea! 

[FASTDEVICE]

correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the new "Number Manager" have a failover feature?


"If your phone system is unreachable for any reason, we can redirect a caller to an alternate phone number or VoIP device. If the Failover number is an external number this call will cost you for both inbound and outbound."

[FASTDEVICE]

ah, it's only available if the number is configured for trunking...

[Tuly]

This is now in the UI

[Logicwrath]

I configured this for a user.  None of his devices were online.  I chose Mobile Phone and entered his phone number in +1##########.  When I dialed his extension I got a message like the following:

"Due to telephone company facility trouble your call cannot be completed at this time."

[Logicwrath]

I actually checked the registration tab in debugging and found that this user did have an extension registered even though his device list under "Users" was showing "RED".  However, his device under devices is showing green.

Interestingly, another user in this account is showing a registration in debugging but his devices (in "Users") are showing "RED" but in "Devices" are showing green.

Some interesting things happening.  I called the user without failover mode on and the call was delivered normally.

[Logicwrath]

Actually, I apologize, the devices are showing green in "Users", however, they are one of the extra hidden devices. from view (+2) or (+1).

So I guess the interesting thing here is that with failover mode enabled, I am unable to call a registered extension and I get the error message I posted earlier:

"Due to telephone company facility trouble your call cannot be completed at this time."