Call forward night service and auto attendant

[m.junghage]

Hi,

A customer want's to use both an auto attendant and call forward night service to external number for short brakes.

The scenario.

Open hours 10-18 -> AA with menu options

Closed for lunch 12-13 -> AA with openhours playing

Brakes -> Receptionist dials *123 to activate and all calls on the main blast group is forwarded to an external call center answering service.

I'v configured the UC for both but when night service is activated it only goes to the AA and not the answering service.

How do I solve this?

Best regards.

[Marcos Hernandez · Accepted solution]

Markus, there are limitations in the interaction of blast hunt groups and the call forward settings of members of such hunt groups. What you need to do is configure a "floating", auxiliary dn that has call forward all to the AA and call forward night service to the external number. Your inbound calls are mapped to that auxiliary dn.

When a call comes in during normal/after hours, it is routed to the AA and from there to the blast group or the after hours prompt, respectively. If night service is invoked, then the DN will forward it to the extenral destination.

Let us know how it goes.

Marcos

[m.junghage]

Thanks for the response Marcos.

How would a configuration like this look like? I'm not that comfortable configuring DN's in CLI and would require some guidence. Maybe this is something the TAC could help me configure?

[Steven DiStefano · Accepted solution]

I am thinking outloud here, and am curious why you dont just set yhe whole thing up with CCA, which allows you to set a code for NS activation during the OPEN hours (as you say during breaks, etc.) and have that toggle on and off for you, as shown in here:

https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-9768

Steve

[David Trad]

Hi Marcos,

Markus, there are limitations in the interaction of blast hunt groups
and the call forward settings of members of such hunt groups.

I am sooooooooooooooo glad you brought this up, cause I was going to ask sooner or later if Cisco have plans to allow for nifty routing/rules to be applied to the Voice Hunt-Group Parallels :), I would assume that this one feature should have a host of sub features as it is quite a vital function of the system (Just me thinking out loud here :D).

What you need to do is configure a "floating", auxiliary dn that has
call forward all to the AA and call forward night service to the
external number. Your inbound calls are mapped to that auxiliary dn.

Sound bit of advice, this seems to be the only way to achieve any form of basic routing functions, not an ideal way of doing things as you need to attach that DN to a phone (In overlay mode I guess) if nothing is attached to it, any calls that hit it will get rejected as it will be considered as a non-active-service, I learnt this the hard way.

As some food for though that you might be able to pass onto the BU team, and hope you dont mind the opinion being put forward, is the following:

• Greater configuration of the VHGP (Voice Hunt-Group Parallel)
• Allow for routing to be applied such as what you can do on the DN's, however with greater control and more features
• Allow for time of day routing to be applied (Either CME based or CUE based), i would suspect this would need to be done by a tcl script inbuilt into the IOS instead of having one reside on the flash (OR maybe one of the flash might be good if it can be customized).
• Allow for Night-service to be a full function-set of the VHGP and for Call forward to be enabled instead of finals, in others words have it in a round about way operate such as a DN would but with more routing rules allowable and can be applied.

As you know VHGP overirdes settings in place on the DN's, since it does that wouldn't it make sense to then give more routing capabilities to the VHGP?

Just my thoughts :)

Cheers,

David.

[Marcos Hernandez]

Thanks David, good stuff as usual. I have forwarded this to the CME folks.

Marcos

[m.junghage]

Hi Steve,

The thing is that is exactly what I did in the first place. The guide mentions "...incoming calls to that extension during night service hours are forwarded to that number". I would like to forward either all calls or a blast group. In this case it's a blast group with three members.

Like I stated earlier, when "call forward night service" is activated by the receptionist all calls are routed to the AA playing "business closed message" instead of forwarding them to the answering service. Am I missing something here?