Calls not coming through - losing a ton of business - last ditch effort

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Demetrios Sourmaidis asked May 8, '14 Steven Lemon commented Sep 14, '14

Calls not coming through - losing a ton of business - last ditch effort

I have been a ring central customer for a bit over a year, and this problem started pretty much right from the beginning of having our account. At that time we only had two phones, and now we have ten. We use the softphones exclusively. Here is what is happening

Certain times during the day (not every day, there is no rhyme or reason to the times it happens) I will notice our call center is slow. So I will dial in the test the phone lines, and I will be sitting on hold while the phones do not ring even though we have reps ready and able to take that call. Sometimes only one persons phone isn't ringing, other times multiple sales reps phones are not ringing. Then 10 minutes later, sometimes more sometimes less, they will begin to function again as usual.

I have called RS support about this now MANY times over the last year and every time a resolution is not found. We have setup port forwarding on the router, that doesnt help. I have adjusted each port on the softphone, that does nothing. Its not an internal setting as its just happening intermittently and then will go back to normal.

One thing I do notice if I go to the department where calls are not coming through, and click on users, it will show those users as being "busy" rather than "available". So clearly RS believes them to be on the phone for some reason, even if they are not and have not been for some time. I *believe* we are missing upward of 10-15 inbound calls a day which translates into a significant loss of business due to this issue. I have no real good way of knowing which calls are being missed as theres no way know this other than seeing that I myself cannot dial in during those periods.

So I am wondering if anyone here may have some ideas as to what is causing this. Its at the point now where I have to change providers as tech support has been unable to resolve this no matter what level they escalate it to.

Internet is a 20mb down / 4 mb up connection. I dont think its anything on my end or these users wouldnt be showing up as "busy" during that period when they are unable to receive calls. Even a reboot of both the softphone and the PC does nothing, user stays in BUSY mode until RS decides to make that person available.

Any ideas??

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Answer 1 · 2014-08-02T17:48:41Z

paul12 answered Aug 2, '14 Chuck Fuscone commented Feb 28, '17

Demetrios,
I am having the same problem. I see that you posted 3 months ago, so I have two questions:
1. Has there been a resolution? If so, please let me know as I'm losing business with Ring Central as my provider.
2. If the answer to #1 is "no", can you recommend a good replacement? I need to fix this problem and Ring Central seems to be too problematic and it's costing me business.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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Chuck Fuscone commented · Aug 03, 2014 at 05:21 PM

Paul, what type of IP phones are you using and what is your network setup like?

In my experience when a call is not delivered to a phone randomly or you have periodic issues then it is something on the local network.

This comes down to the type of switch you are using and the type of router etc.

We could look at the call flow config in the Ring central system but at the end of the day I think the issue is with the local network setup

Chuck
Certified Ring Centtral Installer
ckfuscone@yahoo.com

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Answer 2 · 2014-08-03T03:52:49Z

Chuck Fuscone answered Aug 3, '14

Hey Guys, I am going to chime in with my experience in setting up customers with high call volume on what works and what doesn't. First of all exclusive use of the soft phone for high volume calls is not a great or recommended design for any VOIP system. Demetrios, you mentioned that you started with 3 and now have 10 phones. All soft phones on a computer. You internet looks good but what is the rest of your network like? Wired connections or wireless? What type of switch and what else is going on on the network?

If I were setting this up from scratch I would not recommend the softphone and look for a dedicated IP phone. I know they cost more than a USB headset but in the grand scheme of things they perform much better with out the possibility of something going on on the PC causing an issue with call quality or the softphone reporting back to RC the status of an agent

VOIP is VERY sensitive to what is happening on a local network. Even if you had the IP phones I would still setup a separate network with a separate router to handle the voice traffic. This was always separate in the OLD PBX's and with customers I have setup with high call volume this design works flawlessly

I have worked with many people on this site helping make changes to their networks and overall design to help with high call volume setups.

Let me know if you would like to chat more but after reading both posts, I am confident with changes to IP phones and some local network adjustments, Ring Central will works exactly as you would expect it to

Let me know

Thanks

Chuck
Certified Ring Central Installer
ckfuscone@yahoo.com

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Answer 3 · 2014-09-05T02:47:20Z

Demetrios Sourmaidis answered Sep 5, '14 Steven Lemon commented Sep 14, '14

The problem is with RingCentral themselves. After MANY phone calls, I finally got a real answer from them. When you have a call center routing to a department, if too many calls go to that department then the next few have to wait for a bit before being connected. The caller will hear the music while waiting, but the phones will not ring. After a few minutes pass the call would then be able to be accepted by the agent waiting for the call.

Here is the email I received from my Account Manager Gino Romero:

"From the information I got from Melgee, the bug directly impacts departments with high call queues. This normally happens when more than 4 calls are received by a department. The 5th call waits for approximately 2 minutes in queue even though there are reps available to take the call. I think that we can also divide your current department into three groups of 3 reps each. Since the bug happens on the 5th call coming in to a department, this approach would, theoretically, negate the bug. I would need to figure out how we can have the calls route to the three different departments, though."

This is obviously not acceptable for a call center, so we decided to move away from RC. Note 4 calls in a que is considered "high volume".

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Steven Lemon commented · Sep 14, 2014 at 02:49 PM

You moved away from RC to WHERE?
I have had Packet8, Vonage, Comcast, WOW (I forgot their former name already) and several others and back to RC where I have been for seven years and even with the customer service issues I can't find anywhere else to go, especially with the same features and price..

If you are going to tell people you moved, please tell them where you went. RC won't mind.
I think they know you'll be back.
Like I did.

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