[VoiceOps] Call Overflow Handling

[Alex Balashov]

We consult and provide platforms to trunking providers, so cannot speak
of any in-house policies. 

However, what we see across the board for retail SIP trunking providers
is that customers of our customers don't want to be seen as being out of
business or closed, nor to confuse their inbound callers, when their PBX
is down or unreachable, or they are out of prepaid credit, or something
like that. So, telco disconnect messages and busy signals are frowned
upon. 

The usual request for overflow is to play some sort of innocuously
opaque recording and dump to a generic last-resort voicemail-to-email
system, a la, "Sorry, we're unable to take your call right now. Please
leave your name, number and a brief message, and we will get back to you
as soon as possible" kind of thing. 

I don't know of many SIP trunking providers that provide the option for
custom recordings, and most of ours don't seem to want to get too far
into the business of playing custom recordings for their customers lest
they be expected to provide a variety of them for myriad situations that
are further up the stack, closer to the application/Class 5 level.

-- Alex

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:40:45AM -0700, Carlos Alvarez wrote:

> The events are so few, that I really haven't paid close attention.  We're
> not paying for unanswered calls.  In my testing, early media did work, and
> I haven't heard otherwise.  But we're small, our SIP trunking amounts to
> maybe 500-800k minutes, and rarely do customers not accept the call.
> 
> We have done custom recordings, and limit them to being very short, like
> old style telecom messages.  We have one running right now for a customer
> who has closed an office and nobody is complaining about a problem with it.
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:37 AM Ivan Kovacevic <
> ivan.kovacevic at startelecom.ca> wrote:
> 
> > Carlos,
> >
> > Do you allow customers to customize messaging ... and have you found the
> > early media works fairly consistently? (i.e. someone in between doesn't
> > insert their own ringtone).
> >
> > Also from trunk utilization perspective, that channel is still occupied,
> > right?
> >
> > <http://www.startelecom.ca>
> >
> > *Ivan Kovacevic*
> >
> > *Co-Founder and VP Client Services*
> >
> > *STAR TELECOM*
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 12:33 PM Carlos Alvarez <caalvarez at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> We do this by default for our customers with SIP trunking.  Just play it
> >> as early media and then send a busy.  We have a monthly minimum spend of
> >> $200 per customer so it's not a big deal to do something for each one, we
> >> probably wouldn't do it for $50 customers.
> >>
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:29 AM Deborah McDuffie <dmcduffie at socket.net>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Good morning,
> >>>
> >>> We've got a request from one of our SIP trunk customers, asking us to
> >>> provide an automated recorded message should their inbound call volume
> >>> unexpectedly exceed their trunk capacity (rather than a busy signal).  They
> >>> don't want to have the calls rerouted, or answered, per se, or have people
> >>> leave a message - just an announcement that they have a situation that has
> >>> resulted in an excessive call volume, and asking people to call back.
> >>>
> >>> This is the first time we've gotten such a request, and it doesn't look
> >>> like a common SP service offering.  Normally, customers just provide an
> >>> alternate overflow destination for us to send the calls to.  Are there any
> >>> other service providers who have offered this kind of failover/overflow
> >>> service for exceeding trunk capacity, and, if so, how did you price the
> >>> service?  Please feel free to contact me directly, if you have any
> >>> suggestions.
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Deborah McDuffie
> >>> Sales Engineer
> >>> Socket Telecom
> >>> (573) 817-0000, ext 157dmcduffie at socket.net
> >>>
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> >>>
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-- 
Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC

Tel: +1-706-510-6800 / +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) 
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/