Announcements Given Low Priority by G3si

[mikej97204]

We have a CTI application where we send whispers to the call agents when a call comes in on a specific VDN. I have 4 announcement boards (TN 750C boards, two ver 9's and two ver 13's) in the PBX. Besides the whispers our regular announcements are stored on the announcement boards as well.

I am seeing a problem at times when the call agent is getting an error message saying they didn't answer the call within the time limit (5 seconds) even though the call was not presented for the full 5 seconds. I talked this over with the CTI developer and he said the problem is the announcement is holding up the call and not letting the agent answer the call. He first said that our announcement was too long but it turns out the ones I tested are only about 1.5 seconds long and have been used for a long time.

As we brainstormed over it he thought that maybe when our volume is high that the PBX sends the call to the agent but the announcement is given a lower priority and isn't sent to the agent as fast as the call is... causing the time out error since the announcement has to be given before the agent can answer the screen pop.

I have a Definity G3si ver 9.5 that has two cabinets that are pretty full. I'm running a full 255 voice ports. We do almost max all of the voice T1's out during our peak times although the problems seem to happen when we have a lot of calls come in during a very short period of time (like 25 within 20 or 30 seconds) hitting our VDN's and announcements all pretty much at the same time.

I looked over the usage of my announcements to find out which ones are hit the most and found that almost all of my major announcements, the ones that are used a lot, are all on the same announcement board. One other one has a few semi-heavy used announcements and two have announcements that are lightly used.

This got me to thinking and brought up two questions.

1. Does the announcements get moved to a lower priority value under heavy call volume when the G3 is busy and if so, is there a report to run on this to tell when it's happening. Even better would be a way to fix it, but if this is true, then probably only going to a upgraded PBX would fix it.

2. Does having all of the major announcements on the same announcement board play a roll in this and will spreading them out amoung the other 3 announcement boards help any?

Hopefully this all made sense and someone knows something about it.

Thanks

Mike

 

[2BAvoice]

I believe there is a limited number of ports per board, in the thirties, maybe? The way it was explained to me by Avaya is that each port can play any annc to any number of callers, but you only have a set number of ports, so there can be a lack of ports needed if that board is playing more than 30 something different ones. I am not sure of any of these numbers, it was some time ago, but I do think you need to move your busiest announcements to spread them out.

 

[mikej97204]

I know a board can fill up. I believe it's based on the length of the recorded message. We have 3 that are full or too full to add a message and one that is partially used. I suspect the one that has all of the heavy used announcements is on the first board they installed in this PBX and the rest were added as announcements and whispers were added.

A tech is suppose to do some digging in the PBX to see if we are running out of clock or processor resources. I'm also going to look at some of the announcements and see if I can get rid of them (most have been there since before I got here). One of these days upper management might decide to upgrade to a newer switch.

Thanks

Mike