sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Avaya - Lucent Telephones & Systems Voice mail transfers from auto attendant

Trying to setup a R3l Voice Messaging card and having some troubles with it...

During the day the phones are answered by anybody close to one of them. Auto Attendant is not used.

At night when someone closes the store they go to extension 10 and press the night service button. The auto attendant then picks up all calls after 2 rings. The menu says "press 1 to leave a msg for customer service, 2 for the manager, etc..."

What we want to have happen is when the customer presses 1 they will immediately be transfered into the voice mail for extension 13.

But right now when they press 1 it transfers the call to extension 13, the extension rings about 6 times and then voice mail finally takes over.

Is there a way to make the auto attendant transfer someone directly into voice mail without attempting to transfer the call first?

Give 13 DND and press it when they leave and it will go to it.

You can change the number of VMS coverage rings for that extension. The default is 3 rings, use #321 to change the number of rings. I'm assuming that you have a Partner ACS R3.0 or later processor. This setting will change it for both day and night ringing the only other solution is to program a do not disturb button on ext 13 and activate it before they leave for the day.

I have #321 set for 1 ring, but the extension still rings around 6 times before voice mail picks up.

And due to the way we use phones around here a DND button would not go over well. It would never get turned on or off consistently.

The #321 should change the number of rings before being sent to voice mail cover. I have changed quite a few of these and what ever the number of rings is set for this is when the voice mail answers. If you make an internal call to this extension how many rings does it take before the voice mail answers? Is your processor a ACS R3.0 or later? What version of the Partner Voice Messaging pc card are you using? You can also change the number of rings on the outside lines before the auto attendant answers by using the #506 command. You can do this on a per line basis up to 6 rings.

Unfortunately the PCMCIA voice mail cards don't have a direct voice mailbox transfer option for their selector codes. Put on a DND button on that phone and it will work. You could also create a "ghost" mailbox and set the extention for 1 ring on auto vm coverage, the only bad thing about doing that is there won't be an actual phone to see a message light. Hope that helps.

#321 is set to 1 ring on ALL extensions, even ones without voice mail. But it still takes 6 rings for VM to pickup!

We have a R3 processer and R3L VM card.

Is the voice mail taking 6 rings to answer on an extension to extension call? If so try programming a DND button at one of the extensions that is taking 6 rings to answer (just as a test) and activate DND. See if the voice mail now answers immediately at this extension. If it still rings several times you have some type of system problem. Maybe you could power system down and back up if you haven't already tried that.

One other thing I noticed in reading your original post is that you have incoming calls dial 1 for ext 13. This means you must have digit 1 set up as a selector code transfer which means extensions 10 through 19 with the exception of ext 13 will not be able to be dialed using direct extension transfer from the auto attendant menu.

When calling 777 to access voice mail, does it sometimes take more than 1 ring to answer? I'm suspecting that you have more extensions that just the voice mail ports in hunt group 7. When a call is covered to voice mail, it could be ringing at a misprogrammed port, timing out and hunting to the next "real" port, thus taking and extra 4 ring to get to voice mail.

Just a shot...