sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Panasonic Telephones & Systems TVS120 Dialing Problem

TVS120 VM
TDA200 PBX

The client uses two customer service menus to answer incoming calls. One during the day and one for night mode. The only options in the CS menu are to dial the parties extension, dial 9 for a directory, dial 5 for a customer service group or dial 0 for the operator. They are reporting that many times the callers are dialing an extension that contains a 5 and it goes to the customer service group instead of the extension. The employee who primarily answers calls to that group has been tracking it.

For instance she reports that a caller dialed extension 157 and she got the call. That happened three times in one day. That same day she got a call for extension 154. I asked if the callers could have made a mistake but she did not think so. She said a couple of callers were family members of the person they were trying to reach so they knew the extension they were trying to dial. They were surprised when the customer service group answered. For the record, I tried to duplicate the problem but have been unable to do so.

Any ideas? It always is an extension with a 5 in it. I asked her to track which CO lines (just standard POTS lines) it is happening on. She said it is primarily lines 1 and 2 but has found that it happens on other lines. It is almost like the VM is not hearing any other DTMF tones than the 5. If that were the case I would think we would get reports of the other dialing problems but this is the only one. This is a rather large company as well. Somewhere around 75 users so the auto attendant gets used a lot.

Any help would be appreciated.

Toby, I really don't think the problem is in the TVS or you would see a wider range of trouble.
However, if callers are having trouble reaching extensions 12x, 13x 14x, and so on, they are simply going to hear "I'm sorry, that is not a valid extension" and think they mis-dialed, redial, call goes through and they never mention it.
I would be willing to bet that the majority of these calls are cell phone users.
As for CO line specific, most of the calls probably come in on lines 1 & 2. If it is a "dirty" line I think you would see more problems.
I think your best bet at this time is to re-record each custom menu and use 8 or even the *
to go to customer service.
You would also have to change the digit translation tables in the custom menus.
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MrG

MrG,

Thanks for the ideas. I have suggested that they change the digit but all of there advertisments and letterhead is printed with the number 5 as the customer service option. So it would be a costly change for them to make. Why would the calls coming from a cell phone be differnt than a land line?

Two reasons, with the #1 culprit being poor cell reception. The second being short-duration tone bursts. Many people are in such a hurry to start using their new cell phones that they never explore all of the options available. One is extended DTMF time, which is rarely activated by default.

It is understandable that you can't sacrifice 5 from the menu options right now, but how about setting up some other digit, preferably something to the left or right of 5 just for experimentation purposes? Set this up in addition to leaving 5 intact. I'd use 6 if I were you.

Get the company involved to use 6, as well as yourself for making test calls and see if 6 behaves better than 5. I think you will be surprised.

You can also try to increase the inter-digit timer and make it wait longer for the second digit to be dialed by the caller.