NEC IPS 2000 dropped calls

[largilbert]

Good day all,
We have a support center that services approx 28,000 customers and for the last few months when calls come directly into our que via our toll free number or when getting transfered from our switchboard then transfered to the que the calls occasionally drop or ring a fast busy. There seems to be nothing that stands out here. Our phone vendor has asked to capture some packets to see if there is a network issue going on, we did and the result was that the network is fine. Our phone vendor has been working with us and NEC are at a loss.

The phone system purchased approx 4 years ago is as follows:

NEC IPS 2000 PBX

Call Caenter Worx ACD 3.1.12
NEC Express 5800 INtel Xeon 5110 @ 1.6 GHZ
3.25 GB RAM
MS Win2003 Stnd SP2

AIMWorx
MatWorx Ver. 13.01
MS Win2000 Sp4
Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHZ
5GB RAM

GNAV
NEC Express 5800 Intel Xeon 5110 @ 1.6 GHZ
3.25 GB RAM
Linux Red Hat

Voice Mail NECXMail AD-64
Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHZ
1.5 GB RAM
MS Win 2003 Stnd SP2

Any insight would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Larry

 

[belevedere]

There is no simple solution to fix to this. You need to gather as much information as possible to narrow it down. Occasional dropped calls can be elusive.
1. Has the call reached the CCWX queue? If so, did the caller abandon? Check the GNAV abandon calls report to try and match it up to the time the problem was reported.
2. Is there anything in the LCD of the phone when the call drops?
3. Do you hear anything when the call drops? Clicks, static, dial tone, ring back tone, etc.
4. Is the queue full at the time? Is it a high traffic period? Are all circuits busy or all registers busy? Run some traffic reports in the PBX.
Answers to these questions may help to narrow it down.

 

[largilbert]

Hi belevedere, thanks for the quick response to our issue.

Answers:
1. All calls are either placed in the que via our toll free number or transferred front the switchboard area. I did notice in the “Pilot abandon report” in CCWORX for this month alone there are some ring abandons that are only a few seconds long. Could this be indicative of the issue we are having, thoughts? As far as abandon calls in GNAV, there are none.
2. Our call center use D-TERM Soft Phone, and in those displays I’m not sure if they see or realize that call is being dropped. Normally what happens is either the person will call a second time, connects successfully and then tells the support specialist what happened. Or they will call our main number and speak to our reception person/switch board operator and tell them what happened.
3. The only thing that is being reported (and even when we tested this) is when the phone rings it either drops to dead air, or to dead air and to a fast busy.
4. These call drops are not happening when the que is full, high traffic times, nor are all the circuits busy.

 

[belevedere]

1. The D-Term softphones required an additional license for ACD use in the PBX. You need to verify that you have them.
2. The SP 30 may or may not be compatible with the PC operating system that you are running. Since the product is MFG. discontinued, development with WIN 7 has not progressed.
3. A ring abandon means that the call was presented to an agent and abandoned before answered.
4. Are any non agent phones experiencing the issue? Are there any "hard" phones in the system that can be set up as agents to test to see if it's related to the softphones?

 

[largilbert]

1. We have the proper licenses to use D-Term in an ACD environment on our PBX.
2. At the present time we only have 1 Win7 machine in the support center.
3. I thought that is what ring abandons meant, but I’m wondering is this the dropped calls that I’m seeing in the report.
4. We currently have 2 support specialist using hard phones, one we just switched from a soft phone because GNAV is falsely reporting the agents call count, sometimes more than double. And it’s funny since we put this agent on a hard phone we haven’t had any reports of dropped calls from our customers.

 

[belevedere]

Your last statement leans towards the softphones as the issue. Verify the required specs. Have nothing else running on the softphone. It might be an application conflict.

 

[largilbert]

That is exactly what we are thinking about this issue now. We are going to leave this agent on the hard phone for about another week or so, then put the agent back on the soft phone. If the calls don't drop while on the hard phone, but then start dropping again once back on the soft phone, I think we should have our answer of whats causing it, but then figure out why.

belevedere, you have been most helpful, thank you so much, and I'll let you know how we make out.

Larry