sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Inter-Tel Telephones & Systems Monitor during 3-way call

Hello, My company has an Axxess switch running 9.0 software. We use almost exclusively IP sets. We are having a crucial problem regarding silent monitoring.

Virtuall all calls into our call center involve agents making 3-way calls during the conversation. Unfortunately silent monitoring will cease whenver the station being monitored initiates a 3-way call or puts their call on hold. Therefore we are so far unable to effectively monitor our call center agents.

Our vendor told us this was an inherent design limitation of our switch with no planned resolution or work-around. They recommended that we use a Mercom IP call recorder however these are expensive and Inter-tel so far cannot confirm compatibility.

Does anyone have any suggestions for cost effective methods to silently monitor or record our agents' IP sets during an entire call that typically includes 3-way conference and placing a caller on hold? Real-time would be best but near real-time with a call recorder would be acceptable.

Thanks for any help or suggestions offered!

Hi and welcome to the board.

First, would you mind adding your company's web address to your profile? On an issue like this the techs will be much more responsive if they know who they're talking to.

Next, I'm not sure I fully understand the issue. True Supervisory Monitoring will terminate when during the initiation, but by initating a remonitor a few seconds later, the supervisor is back monitoring the call. Is this an issue?

Also, is monitoring the trunk an option? If so there are some very good work arounds that will allow a supervisor to transfer to an extension off a SL Card.

Try the OAISYS Tracer! We have installed about a dozen in the past year. Great product and less than a mercom.

Thank you. I have added our URL. My company provides financial-related services to merchants in the sub-prime lending market including customer support. We operate a call center for handling our client's customer calls.

The issue occurs when we silently monitor an agent on a customer service call. The agent initiates a three-way call with an outside party such as a bank to verify financial information or an employer to verify employment/payroll information. The caller is kept on the line during the conference. As soon as the agent begins the three-way call the silent monitor is cut off. If you try to monitor the agent again, the monitor won't connect. Apparently you cannot monitor extensions while they are doing a 3-way call. As this occurs on most of our calls it really is causing us a problem.

We have a similar issue where monitoring is cut off when agent places their caller on hold. You can only re-establish the monitor when the caller is taken off hold.

Just this morning our vendor did advise that they are developing a proposal involving products from OAISYS.

I'm wondering though if there is some kind of work-around or an inexpensive way to accomplish this since it really should be a built-in feature of the PBX.

Trunk-side monitoring is too expensive - we have four PRI's and handle hundreds of calls per day to more than a dozen DID's. We can't afford a system to handle that volume on the trunk side.

Thanks for the advice, I like our system a lot but I am very dissapointed in this flaw and I'm trying anything I can think of to work around this.

OAISYS offers station side in which you could mintor!

I don't think Auto Call Record would work in this case as it just uses the station monitor feature code to monitor just as a user would. I think this guy is just gonna have to go trunk side and ante up the big bucks.

I have been testing silent monitor myself to see exactly what works and what doesn't work - it's not very reliable. Often I would monitor an extension and find that monitoring won't connect, drops immediately or will suddenly drop for no apparent reason. I guess it is just not that robust a feature.

I'll post back as to what worked when we have a solution.

He needs to use the OAISYS Tracer (trunk side), not auto call record as I indicated in a earlier post.

Also the OAISYS Tracer can go station side and it is passive to the phone system. Meaning it is tapped at the 66 block and does not utizlize any system resources.

Unfortunately we are 100% IP. Phones plug through standard patch panel to POE switch. I'm waiting for my vendor to give me a VOIP monitoring solution, also call center management looking at a few other products that have been recommended.

This may sound crazy but I'm also thinking about Y cables for every headset and just running the 2nd Y extenstions down the middle spline of the cubes to a patch panel at the end of each row for manual monitoring / recording.