Limiting inbound calls to group of phones?

[sjhrhaskell]

Hey gang,

I've got a group of six 7961s, all of which have an appearance of the same line (5000, for example.) Inbound calls from the PSTN are delivered via a PRI, and in theory, the number of incoming calls are limited only by the capacity of the PRI.

The problem is that there isn't enough staff to handle all of the inbound traffic, and users have requested that simultaneous inbound calls be limited to four for the entire group of six phones. Any new calls beyond 4 should get a busy signal. One complicating factor is that only 4 of the 6 phones are guaranteed to be staffed at any given time... the other two phones may or may not be staffed.

What's the best way to do this? Setting the Busy Trigger parameter won't work because the two potentially unstaffed phones will never have an established call when not staffed. I could build a hunt group, but I'm not sure how to place a hard limit on calls into the group. Any ideas?

Thanks!

[paolo bevilacqua]

Hi,

I think you are using Call Manager.

In this case, beside the confiration options on the CCM, if you are using H.323 on the router, you can for example set limits at dial-peer level for number of calls, plus other things as well.

Hope this helps, please rate post if it does!

[allan.thomas]

There are certain features which are available which could possibly help with the situation but largely depends on which version of CCM are you using?

The reason is that in 4.2 there is the H-Login softkey which provides the ability of logging in and out of a respective huntgroup.

Another option is that within CCM5.x you can also configure the Hunt Pilot to use the personal preferences on a phone to forward on busy or no answer. So if either of the other two handsets do not answer you can forward to another number.

Additionally you can configure pickup on the Hunt Pilot, so another member could pickup the call from these phones if they were available.

Do you have UM, another option would be to forward the unanswered calls to Unity and play a standard greeting before attempting a supervised transfer to the hunt-pilot?

Regards

Allan.

HTH.

Pls rate helpful posts.

[sjhrhaskell]

Sorry, CCM version is 4.2(3). MGCP to 2621 gateway with PRIs. And yes, we are also running Unity.

Even with the H-Login softkey, would that even help? Regardless of the number of users logged in, how do I limit the number of inbound calls? If there are 4 users on inbound calls and a new call comes in, wouldn't it just be presented to the users, exactly the same as if multiple inbound calls were presented to a user directly?

Somehow I need to limit the traffic so that additional calls over 4 do not even ring the phones in the group, but get a busy signal (preferred) or go straight to Unity.

Thanks!

[allan.thomas · Accepted solution]

Incoming numbers can be presented by your Telco across any number of given channels on the PRI ISDN.

Have you spoke your Telco about reducing the number channels which are specifically assigned to this number?

Are you aware of whether there are other numbers are built onto the PRI ISDN? The reason is that if this is the only number, then you could possibly busy the other b-channels by configuring b-channel status in service parameters. I suspect you have several numbers incoming.

Either way you will still be unable to designate which of the six phones with the shared number will ring unless they are in a hunt-group.

Another alternative would be to configure an AC hunt-group and enable queuing, this will enable you to specify how many calls are allowed before queuing begins.

The only caveat about this is that the calling party will instantly hear MoH when the call is queued, and soon as a member is available the call will be routed through. However it is possible to change the MoH source to be ringing or a message instead.

If you configure a Line-group with six members, and two of them are logged-out of the group, now providing the busy trigger has been changed a fifth call would not succeed.

Depending how the hunt-pilot and line-group is configure will determine how this call will be handled. Whether is forwarded to VM/another number or to simply stop routing.

Another option would be to configure 5000 for example as your CTI Route Point, configure the busy trigger to 4, and configure the call forward all to a hunt-pilot for a line-group with all members of the six phones. (you will have to change the DNs allocated to these from a shared-line)

Configure each member with the H-Login softkey, additionaly configure them with an EM profile. This will enable any of the six phones to log in and out of the huntgroup dynamically or completely through EM. Thus allowing any combination of the six phones to receive one of the four calls.

Regards

Allan.

[sjhrhaskell]

Wow, great suggestions Allan. Thanks. I used your last suggestion of configuring 5000 as a CTI route point forwarding to a hunt group, and that works. However, I found that setting the busy trigger on the CTI line did not have the desired effect... instead I had to drop the busy trigger down to 1 on each line in the line group. Which seems to work as desired. Thanks for the help!