Transfer calls to 3cx and back without using active calls

[frederik76]

Hi,

A customer of ours has 2 dozen of restaurants, each with their own 3cx. They want to change the tapes of the IVRs regularly on all of the restaurants in a central way. Currently they send us the audio-files and we log into every of the 3CXs and change the tapes. But that takes a rather long time and it's really easy to make mistakes or forget a 3CX.

So what we've come up with is to first create a bridge between the restaurants and the HQ. Then when calls come into the restaurant, transfer calls to HQ, play the correct tapes based on a call flow (each restaurant gets its own IVR with a certain tape) and lastly transfer the call back to the original 3cx to connect to a ring group.

The problem here is that each call that passes through HQ, uses 2 of the active available calls. While after the tapes have played and the caller gets redirected back to the correct restaurant, the 3CX at HQ isn't really involved anymore.

So I was wondering if there's a way to let the originating 3cx pick the call back up to clear up the lines on HQ?

 

[leejor]

Once a call is transferred, the control is then with the transferred destination, in your case the HQ PBX. The HQ PBX then has to send the call back to the desired destination, again using a transfer. This will keep multiple paths active in both the originating PBX and the HQ PBX. There is no way to get around this other than doing something like a 3-way call, then then the original PBX would drop the third leg once the message had been played. I'm not certain how you would automate something like that.

Would it be practical installing SBCs at the restaurant locations, all controlled by the HQ PBX?

 

[frederik76]

I'm not sure how to do that with SBCs.
I also don't really like the whole idea of making all the restaurants depend on the single 3CX of the HQ anyway.
Maybe I could just push the new audiofiles to the restaurant-3CXs and restart the IVRservice. Then they could all remain to work independently, yet we could centrally update the files

 

[NickD_3CX]

Here's an alternative idea.

From your description, you are already familiar with the Call Flow designer.

You could potentially load a CFD into each restaurants PBX which every e.g. 1 hour, whenever then next call comes in, downloads a WAV file from a online repository, replaces the existing one and plays that.

The only downside to this would be that instead of having one CFD in a central location, you would need to have one on each 3CX.