How many voice mail ports needed?

[Agentstarks]

Right now we have the 007 MLM with 4 voice mail ports for about 40 - 45 employees. It seems that sometimes people aren't being able to get into voicemail because there are no more free ports. This doesn't just happen at the start of work or lunchtime, it just happens randomly. Also, sometimes the system will just drop an attempt to connect to voicemail after waiting for 10 seconds or so for a new port to open. What solutions have you guys found for this? One option is to replace our 2 port expansion card with the 4 port expansion card, but that's like $900. Should 4 ports be enough or should we take the plunge to 6?

 

[campyracr]

Consider this. Everytime someone calls & gets VM that's a port used. If someone dials in to retrieve a message, that's a port used. If Jane calls Bob internally and get's his VM, that's a port used. You can see how quickly 4 ports will get used with 40 employees.

 

[merlinman]

One test you can do to see if the Voice Mail is really busy is to put an Auto Dial button on your phone for Voice Mail (If you don't already have one) and observe when people are having trouble if the light is on or not.

If it is on, that means that all ports are busy.

If it is not on when they are having trouble, perhaps you are have other problems.

 

[Pepperz]

You can't really say that a 10:1 ratio of uses to voice mail ports is enough or not. It's totally company dependant. What you might want to do is put auto dial buttons for the 4 voice mail ports on a phone, and observe how often all are lit. It's not worth it for just a few times, but may well be worth it in other cases. One of the big things here that should be considered is the use of an auto-attendant to answer company calls. If you have a hunt group of inbound lines answered by an AA, then 4 ports are almost certainly not enough to handle the volume. Moreover, your customers aren't getting through.

Pepperz@charter.net