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Uniformity Is Crucial in the Dial Plan

The dial plan still is an important asset that, when left mismanaged or worse yet, in the care of a vendor, can prove unproductive, compel callers to give up calling, and even present the company with potential liability issues.

In a recent case, the first issue discovered was that the hosted voice provider assigned 4-digit extension numbers and non-consecutive DID numbers. The assigned DID numbers in fact are pooled together to include different exchanges (Please don't say, "What's that?"), and when Caller-ID reveals different cities for employees physically located in just one city, another problematic issue surfaces.

The station digits or last four digits of the DID numbers do not match the system's Intercom or internal station numbers. In other words, employees must dial a completely different 4-digit extension number for other employees--they can't just use the last 4 digits of the DID number.

There's a safety issue too for employees that haven't logged into their telephone and administered their settings to have a local DID number representing their company-listed directory number. These employees may find themselves in dismay should they ever have the need to dial 911, since that call will go to a local Public Service Answering Point (PSAP) that will need a local DID.

Another issue: Inbound callers hear a recorded message, "Please hold while we try your party," but this will give rise to a certain uneasiness if the recording repeats and a wav file continues to play canned music to callers, seemingly indefinitely. Businesses still need to promote a degree of professionalism, and when callers perceive that they cannot contact employees within a company, they may move on.

Next are the conflicting settings for extensions to forward to the hosted voice mail when the same extensions have parallel ringing setup for the users' smartphones. Should callers route back to the hosted voice mail, or does it make more sense to let callers route into the user's cellular voice mail? In this case, since employees are assigned cellular phones and the company foots the bill, the company ended up letting the cell phone capture the callers on the cellular voice mail. This also avoids unnecessary email traffic sent from the host to the user's cellular phones.

Consistency in any solution will produce better results, and when the dial plan becomes a smorgasbord of DID numbers without matching station digits and unchecked features, companies are sure to experience loss.

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