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Bounce back on transfer fail

Posted by andrewyager on Wed, 12/03/2008

Hi,

Our customers often have situations where they transfer calls, but for one reason or another the person they transfer the call to doesn't pick it up - e.g. they are on the phone, pick up another call microseconds before they pick up the one being transferred to them, or similar situation. Many of them are used to old style key systems where if their transfer fails, the call bounces back to the transferring party. They would often transfer it to a different extension for voicemail.

Is it possible to implement such a feature? I've been trying to think about how I would go about it, but coming up blank.

Andrew


Submitted by eeman on Thu, 12/04/2008 Permalink

I am assuming this is a blind transfer versus an attended transfer? Because people shouldnt release an attended transfer until the other person answered the call. Ring-backs are part of parking which behave the way you describe. There is no way to differentiate a prematurely released attended transfer from just a straight call to their extension. Eventually it will timeout and go to the callee's voicemail. Make sure your users have their 'zero out' extensions set so that if someone presses zero inside voicemail it will ring the correct person.

Submitted by andrewyager on Fri, 12/12/2008 Permalink

Thanks for this - that's what I had thought.

Next question: what do you do if a user blind transfers to a failure extension?

Andrew

Submitted by eeman on Fri, 12/12/2008 Permalink

I suppose the callee calls back and says 'you idiot, you sent me to an invalid extension!' :)

invalid handlers are processed under the 'i' extension. Technically you could change this behavior around. When a blind transfer occurs, the variable ${BLINDTRANSFER} is set to the extension that sent the call. In theory, you could exten the i handler to include a check to see if the variable has data and ring the call back to the caller.