VitalPBX / Asterisk Limit Calls Then Go To Voicemail
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So this is a weird one, but we have a customer who is used to, and depends on, a really weird telephony workflow where they have a set number of inbound calling capacity (like two to four lines, they want four) and anything more than that goes to voicemail. Sounds simple to duplicate, but it's not.
Now we are on Skyetel and VitalPBX. So Skyetel sends through "unlimited" calls. No issue there. VitalPBX can handle unlimited calls. All of the calls go to a ring group which, if no one answers, goes to a second ring group.
It's impossible to explain why they want it to behave the way that they want, but they do and are absolutely adamant that it needs to work a specific way.
It's bizarre, but they want this specific ring group pattern, but with a limit of only four concurrent calls coming in from Skyetel. We can't limit in Skyetel, or the calls won't make it to the voicemail. But there's no way, that we can come up with, to create an internal PBX limit of four calls going to the ring groups.
To make things even more complex, they immediately answer calls and put them into parking spaces. So the calls don't remain in the ring group or on the phone so they "disappear" from any RG or queue because they switch to parking.
Anyone have ideas?
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The situation is literally about human insanity. Apparently the owners of the company want calls going to voicemail because they don't want to pay for humans to be available to answer the regular call volume. But they hire people who care about the calls being answered and can't deal with the stress of knowing that there is a call coming in that they cannot get to, but aren't crippled by knowing that they are going to voicemail all day. It's all about the sound of the phone ringing.
So basically they are trying to make it "ring less" but not miss calls, but not get to them timely; all because one group feels compelled to get to them much more timely than they can possibly do.
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We thought about an internal loopback trunk to do a call limit, but not sure how to make it work.
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ok, this needs to be in the I can't even thread....
Just WTF.
That said, it can be done easily with two trunk providers and the trunk limit of 4.. But keeping it to a single trunk... Yeah no. Not at least easily.
So this would need to get into a bit of customer Asterisk dialplan.
You caught me beginning two days of on site work in Tennessee, so I won't have time to look at this.
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This sounds like a complicated answer, but so is your problem. ... What if you setup 2 tenants - Tenant 1 = client, Tenant 2 = overflow - then limit the first tenant (your client) with trunk Skyetel to the 4 trunk limit. Then on Skyetel, you setup failover Tenant1 -> Tenant2. Then Tenant 2 will grab the extra calls destined to voicemail. Then you setup a trunk betweeen those two without the 4 trunk limit, and that trunk on Tenant 1 goes immediately to voicemail.
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Actually - to save myself a FFS - I'll only leave this here
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@scottalanmiller said in VitalPBX / Asterisk Limit Calls Then Go To Voicemail:
The situation is literally about human insanity. Apparently the owners of the company want calls going to voicemail because they don't want to pay for humans to be available to answer the regular call volume. But they hire people who care about the calls being answered and can't deal with the stress of knowing that there is a call coming in that they cannot get to, but aren't crippled by knowing that they are going to voicemail all day. It's all about the sound of the phone ringing.
So basically they are trying to make it "ring less" but not miss calls, but not get to them timely; all because one group feels compelled to get to them much more timely than they can possibly do.
Oh yeah - this is exactly how our staff felt here with the additional calls coming in.. they were freaking out - OMG we're busy all the time, we never have time to stuff envelopes anymore, etc. to whit the management should have said - that's fine, I hired you to answer phones, not stuff envelopes, you only did that because you had spare time, now you don't - so we'll find someone else to stuff them.
Oh old system worked nearly identically to your client's old system. once we ran out of lines, calls simply stayed in carrier voicemail. the carriers were unwilling/unable to provide a call abandonment rate, and we didn't have the logging option for the PBX, so we had no idea. Basically we relied upon patient complaints (and still do actually) to dictate when we up staffing on the phones.
Now, had we not provided the operators with a console showing them how many calls were in queue - it's likely we would have continued with things as normal - other than they would be complaining, we still don't have time to stuff envelopes because there are so many more calls, which is duh - because we now have more open lines to get those calls to you.
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@krzykat said in VitalPBX / Asterisk Limit Calls Then Go To Voicemail:
This sounds like a complicated answer, but so is your problem. ... What if you setup 2 tenants - Tenant 1 = client, Tenant 2 = overflow - then limit the first tenant (your client) with trunk Skyetel to the 4 trunk limit. Then on Skyetel, you setup failover Tenant1 -> Tenant2. Then Tenant 2 will grab the extra calls destined to voicemail. Then you setup a trunk betweeen those two without the 4 trunk limit, and that trunk on Tenant 1 goes immediately to voicemail.
Sounds crazy, but it just might work.
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@scottalanmiller said in VitalPBX / Asterisk Limit Calls Then Go To Voicemail:
We can't limit in Skyetel, or the calls won't make it to the voicemail.
My first thought would be to route calls (when their are 4 current calls) to a specific DiD that goes right to VM.
Are you working with Skyetel with custom programming or are you limited to their web portal options?
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@JasGot said in VitalPBX / Asterisk Limit Calls Then Go To Voicemail:
@scottalanmiller said in VitalPBX / Asterisk Limit Calls Then Go To Voicemail:
We can't limit in Skyetel, or the calls won't make it to the voicemail.
My first thought would be to route calls (when their are 4 current calls) to a specific DiD that goes right to VM.
Are you working with Skyetel with custom programming or are you limited to their web portal options?
Not sure what we'd have them do to fix the issue.
