I don't know if this information is going to help anyone out, but I'm going to post it anyway. We spent hours and hours learning about some of these "gotchas" so hopefully this information is helpful (and accurate). If I miss something, kindly correct me as well. I'm sure some of these items are programming issues.
There is no question this system packs a punch for it's price. Voice over IP is pretty cool, the expanadability on these systems is somewhat limitless, and so on. However, a lot of the features are still beta at best as far as I'm concerned. In a world that expects 99.99% uptime in phone technology, the amount of upgrading, rebooting, patching and programming we've had to do on this system to get it working has been a real issue for us. Had I known about some of these catches beforehand (especially the intercom -> intercom -> voicemail routing issues relating to fwd on busy), we probably would not have purchased this unit for our company.
------------------------ OUR GOALS
------------------------
- A PRI/T1 circuit with 23 voice channels for inbound/outbound calls
- Three remote IP phones routed via an Internet and a VPN setup
- Two call center type hunt groups that route to the most idle person first
- Reporting on the call center features (# calls/day, avg call length, etc.)
- Call recording and monitoring abilities (mostly for call center)
- Two intercom/line buttons per person, with call routing setup to ring line 1 -> ring line 2 -> go to voicemail. If both lines are busy or not answered after 4/5 rings, the call should go to voicemail as well.
- An auto-attendant to answer our main line and route calls
- No receptionist
- Each employee gets a phone number (35XX) and a corresponding fax number (36XX). Faxes are delivered into their email box.
I'm guessing most of this (with the exception of IP phones and maybe faxing) is fairly standard.
-------------- PROS
--------------
- Pretty flexible in call routing. Can have lots of appearances and terminations of different lines in a variety of ways.
- Call quality is superb. Conference calls sound superb.
- Voice over IP functionality is cool and *relatively* reliable (although see cons below)
- Easy connections and a relatively self contained physical unit
- Call Pilot software (faxing/voicemail in your Outlook) has been relatively reliable and bug-free.
- System has never "crashed"
- Lots of software tools to help maintain everything from the actual system settings to the printed out labels that go on the phones themselves.
- Voicemail system is very complete - includes remote notification options, call transfer features, etc.
- Skillsets are very flexible
- Monitoring call center calls is easy and unintrusive. Supervisors can easily join in on a call if they want to add advice/information/corrections/etc.
- Flexible integration of Caller ID, for both incoming and outgoing purposes (ONN)
- Unified messaging is pretty flexible in it's dealing with actual messages. You can forward voicemails/faxes from Outlook to outside emails and they'll appear as .WAVs or .TIF files, which are easy to manage.
- Really flexible music on hold system
- Flexible auto-attendant system allows us to have multiple 800 #s that route to different departments without being forced to use one menu tree. This is really awesome.
- Restrictions that can be set per phone allow us to avoid a receptionist and just have a phone at our entry way that people can use to dial the party they are looking for. For a company of our size, this was a nice addition.
- The number of software applications provided to monitor overall system usage, modify mailbox settings and so on is excellent. We wish they were integrated into one tool but the functionality to modify settings when we need to is always available so we can't really complain.
------------ CONS
------------
- The above incoming call configuration of intercom 1 -> intercom 2 ->
voicemail is not possible in a reliable fashion. If intercom1 and intercom2 are busy, the call gets routed to an 'overflow' extension. If you don't have a receptionist, then this isn't helpful - routing to voicemail as the 'overflow' doesn't work. One might try the 'forward on busy' option, but it causes calls to never ring intercom 2 at all and go straight to voicemail if just one of the two lines is in use. Changing the number of appearances of a target line doesn't fix this. This appears to be a bug in my opinion but Tier 2 support claims it's "by design".
- The "fax line" idea that our salesman told us we could utilize isn't foolproof. It's actually just an "express messaging" line that answers as voicemail and auto-detects faxes, although it doesn't always succeed in detection. The detection of fax tones doesn't occur until the voicemail system tries to begin recording a message - not during the playing of the greeting. Some machines hangup by the time the greeting is done.
- Administration of auto-attendants, greetings and other voicemail features is confusing at best via the web interface, although the context help is usually pretty accurate.
- Conference calls are limited to 3-way/3-party conferences.
- Unified messaging (receiving faxes/voicemails in Outlook) creates it's own mailbox for voice/fax messages. So you end up with two Inboxes to check. This isn't really "integration" with your existing Outlook setup in my opinion. I've been told there's a way around this but haven't figured it out yet.
- If an agent on a call center/skillset has a personal voicemail setup using forward on no answer, a call in the skillset that is unanswered will go to "voicemail". But since the voicemail system seems to work off of the original dialed DN, a missed call in a call center reroutes the caller back into the queue they originally dialed into and they lose their place in "line".
- There's a lot of overlap in hunt group timings/voicemail forward timings/etc. For example, hunt groups can ring extensions for
- Call recording feature forces an automated voice that says "Your call is being recorded." There is no way to turn this off. We have a generic "Your call may be monitored for quality and training purposes" that gets played at the beginning of the call which is sufficient enough - we don't want this recording played every time we ACTUALLY record a call. This has rendered this feature useless for us.
- Logging in for "agents" in the call center system is cumbersome. After you login from a phone, you must press the release button to "hangup" on the skillset system, otherwise your soft keys get stuck on "IN / ADMIN" and won't show the transfer button or other available features while you're on a call. However, hitting release forces you to again enter your ID/password when logging out.
- This is NOT an "integrated" system in my opinion from a management perspective, although it was sold to us as one. Voicemail features are managed through a totally different interface then the actual phone system. Call center reporting features actually require a seperate computer altogether running specific IIS versions and software. In addition, when conflicts exist during programming within one piece of the system (i.e. phone related features, voicemail features) you usually are notified with an error dialog. But conflicts between the various subsystems (a phone forwarding setting and an auto attendant setup on the same DN, a call redirect/network transfer setting in one system that's not set in the other, a slew of passwords from one subsystem to the next) are often difficult to track down.
- The networking features, which include VPN abilities and so on, are useless to us because they are insecure. The BCM is based on a Windows NT platform. It is my belief that if we actually routed our regular network/Internet traffic through the BCM
- Skillsets are required to have their own voicemail box. However, this mailbox can't turn the voicemail indicators on on phones that have their own, personal voicemail. In other words, if all the representatives in a call center skillset (such as a sales department) have personal voicemailboxes, nobody will ever be notified if a message is left in the general mailbox. You just have to check it periodically.
- All updates/patches must be installed by a certified installer. This is frustrating for us, although maybe that's just because of the contractor Qwest stuck us with, I don't know.
- You can have multiple users to manage the phone system, but the voicemail system only has one real management account. The accounts, in general, have different username/password setups and requirements as well.
- Voice over IP sets are hard to debug when issues arise. We have a lot of one-way speech path issues where one party can't hear anything from the other. I'm convinced this is a bug in the BCM but there's no user-end debug tools to utilize to find this out. The closest thing available is the BCM Monitor tool but it only shows ports in use and estimated bandwidth usage (which seems to be just a guess and inaccurate)
--------------- NUISANCES
---------------
- All the software/tools are stored on the BCM itself for easy access. But the BCM is limited to a 2mbps download speed it seems. This seems silly. Maybe there's something set wrong, but we're a full gigabit switched infrastructure so we should be getting better performance then this.
- Only 4 selectable ringers on the recommended T7316E phone set. Can't set individual ringers on individual lines (i.e. call center ring versus regular line ring). For offices where people work close together but are often near but not at their desk, this is annoying.
- Programming i2004 phones is pretty painful. Some functions can only be programmed through the phone via a clunky configuration interface (press 4 buttons in sequence within a 1-second time period during startup or you have to 'reboot' the phone). Other features (like functions in the function list) must be programmed by the administrator through a web interface. In addition, the huge LCD screen is pretty much a waste and for looks. If you look carefully at the phone there's only 12 speed dial/function buttons.
- Can't call a call center internally. No indication of this if you try though - the phone just rings forever. This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere.
- The ATA adapters that allow you to hookup an external analog device (like a fax) do some odd things when routing calls while the unit is busy. If you set the overflow extension to the unit's own extension number, calls are 'queued' and ring until the device becomes available. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it differs from other phones. It does not seem to be related to any settings like # of appearances of a target line, etc. This isn't really bad, it was just unexpected.
- Updates require a lengthy reboot. Takes about 15-20 minutes for the BCM to fully reboot. This is unacceptable in a true call center environment during the day, so updates must always be done at night (I suppose this isn't terribly unusual).
It is worth noting that getting this far required a bunch of patches/updates from our installer. Without these, faxing didn't work reliably at all and a bunch of the above routing options we're utilizing failed also.
Anyway, that's what we've found so far. I hope this helps someone somewhere make a more informed decision about using this system, and if I'm lucky, Nortel will take these comments seriously and fix some of the items that I believe are truly bugs!