Hello All,

I have a customer who is a small/ medium sized call center. They had an old System 25 and maxed it out at 256 ports. Our company spoke to Avaya about putting this customer into and IP Office 412. They said that it would be a good fit. We informed the ATAC of the configuration and spoke to an Avaya engineer before moving forward with the proposal Here is the system configuration:

IP Office 412 Ver 3.2.55
3 T1 circuits
2-16 port analog trunk modules
1-DS 30 module
7-30 station analog modules
1-Voicemail pro 16 ports

The customer currently has 104 trunks, which are a mixture of T1 and analog trunks, and approx 170 collectors. They do work 2 shifts. 8am-4pm, and noon to 8pm. So during the day between noon and 4pm all 170 colllectors are there.
Now to the jist of the question, the collectors are not liking the phone system because they ALL have single line phones, and they are the $10.00 Wally World phones so they use their hookswitch to hang up the call, transfer calls, perform 3-way calling, call waiting. What has been happening is that when they hang up a call they are hitting the hookswitch so fast that it is actually putting the call that they were on on hold and then they are grabbing another trunk to dial out. So in essence they are tying up trunks and then the availability of outbound trunks is diminished. They are also complaining of "dead air" when they dial out.Provider message coming on to tell them "You have not dialed enough digits" and also re-order tones (fast busy) when dialing out.
At Avayas recommendation, we purchased 10 model 6211 analog phones with a positive disconnect hookswitch to give to the most problematic folks and that seems to be working. My new problem is that their on site IT guy says that he has been researching the system and that we sold them the wrong product, not enough processing speed. I have not reached the maximum capacity of this system as Avaya has outlined and I feel that their problems are more user related though. My question is, is there anything that you folks have run into that may shed some light on this situation, or does anyone have any ideas.
My thoughts are to have them add another T1 as I feel that their trunks are being maxxed out, but unfortunately I will have to spend a day there to prove it. Also is there a way to set the system up to record when all trunks are maxed so that we can monitor how many times a day that it happens if any. Sorry so long, I wanted to provide as much info as possible and I am getting frustrated.

Brian

Personally I would have installed 3.2.55 as well. BUT, with 4.0 you get alot of nice insight to your resources (vm channels trunk channels , etc...) It alos give you trunk congestion errors, which would be very helpfull in this case.

Even with call status you should be able to look and see if the users hitting the hook switch is putting the call on hold or not.

I would try giving the analog users a longer busy wrap up time, and tell them not to hang up, let the callers hang up on the call. OR, if you never have a need for the users to need the "flash hook" operation, under extensions>analogue, change the minimum flash hook width to the max of 490. See what that will do, not sure if it will solve the problem, which is user training, not system capacity.

Hind sight being 20/20. I would have set the system up for 5402 phones instead of analog. Then the users would have had a cheaper phone with a DROP button.

With the right call accounting software you can see how many simultaneous calls you had (not realtime though)

Replace the $10 WalMart phones with S/L phones that have positive disconnect AND a flash button for transferring.