On 27-Jul-11 15:05, Jay Hennigan wrote:
On 7/27/11 6:28 AM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
I've had numerous customers ask for longer ringback timeouts on the calling side; it turns out that the above is a /very/ common practice for toll-free numbers. The menus and hold music are all "ringback" messages, and the call isn't actually "answered" until a human agent gets on the line. As many of us are unfortunately aware from our own experience calling customer (dis)service lines, that can easily exceed five minutes. The menus? Really?
I have had issues with this and as far as I can tell, the menus should not be considered ringing.
We have had reports of DTMF failures navigating the IVR of toll-free numbers from time to time. American Airlines is one specific example.
The most common complaints I've seen involve airlines; so far, I know United, American and US Airways use this trick. Banks are a distant second, but most of them seem to do it too; they just generate fewer complaints since most folks are only calling to check balances and such via the automated system, rather than waiting for a human.
What we have found is that there really isn't a DTMF issue, but that the forward audio path is being disabled until answer somewhere enroute. This is to me the correct behavior and was implemented at least a decade ago as a fraud prevention measure to prevent an endpoint from simply not providing answer supervision and conversing.
We tried that and quickly got smacked down by our customers, and I suspect the same happened to other folks.
So I could theoretically have a toll-free number that would have a menu, "Press 1 to hear an audiobook recording of 'War and Peace'; press 2 to hear the 1812 overture..." and run it for free? Doesn't seem kosher.
The replacement "solution" is to put a hard limit on the amount of time spent in ringback state. We default to 180 seconds and get periodic complaints; changing that to 300 seconds seems to make the complaints go away. S -- Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking