Low Volume

[fishin4me]

Can anybody provide me some insights on causes for low volume with callers who call into an IVR system. We have recorded utterances of callers with very apparent low volume. These callers originate from out of the state so I suspect it has something to do in the Public Netork. Unfortuneatly I'm not technical enough with Telco so I'd appreciate some possible causes for this.
Thanks,

 

[SYQUEST]

Hi fishin4me,
You may have some bad trunk lines coming into your IVR system. Trunk lines are the circuits that come from the public network, specifically your service provider or Telco. Not knowing your configuration, the trunks can be analogue or digital. You will want to try to identify what trunks the calls come in on, that may be having transmission problems. Once you have identified the suspect trunk or trunks, you will need to further test the trunk port of your IVR. These can go bad also. If they are analogue depending upon the configuration, you may be able to swap trunks around to try to isolate what is actually defective. If it is a bad trunk from Telco, you will need to report it to repair service. It should have an id, like a phone number or line number. You need to give this to repair, also get a ticket number when you do ANY reports to repair. This is important, because it makes things go alot faster when you need to get back to them or escalate to a higher level if you don't get the response you expect.

If your trunks are digital, tracing trouble is somewhat different. This all depends upon what kind of digital we are talking about, ie: T1, ISDN, DSL, VOIP, etc. But the basics usually will still work as far as trying to find which trunk is causing the problem in most situations.

At this point I will wait to see what your response is...

Hope this helps!
....JIM....

 

[fishin4me]

Thanks for the response. The IVR uses an NMS voice card (and AG4000 2T to be exact) and a T1 is used (OPS). We've already ruled the card out by swapping a different NMS board (it's highly unlikely they have two bad baords). So I agree that there can be bad circuits from the T1.
Thanks again.

 

[Mongo5150]

That brings up another psooible scenario. Are the lines that you are having trouble on, over the T1 or the analog lines? You have to isolate that first.

 

[fishin4me]

The IVR system is connected to a T1. Callers are calling from analog and digital phones from different areas (in and outside of the state). So the calls go across the Public Netork.

 

[steph4pbx]

I just saw this and if you have not already solved this problem, you might also want to check the settings that you have for that route on your system. There is a setting called "PAD" on the NEC systems (such as 2400 IPX, 2400 MMG, etc) which enables you to set the PAD on the card (whether or not you want to decrease the volume. It has settings such as 1-7; 7 is NO PAD which means you don't get any drops in the db and the others are varying degrees of reduction of db.) If youhaven't already solved this - I would try that as I have done that with at least 3 switches and it handled this problem.
Hope that helps.