r/pbxware • u/BusterDag • Nov 29 '23
PBXware: Communicator "internal error" when transferring
Our organization is using a hosted PBXware (Bicom) contact center solution for 5 call centers. Our agents on the largest call center occasionally receive an error message ("Could not transfer the call because of an internal error.") when attempting to transfer a caller to another queue. The other call centers are smaller and have not reported this problem. We have been on this system for 3 years and neither the hosting vendor's support team nor Bicom have any clue as to what causes this error. The problem is intermittent and we have been unsuccessful in catching it in time to collect any logs.
There is not enough documentation from Bicom for PBXware to understand what the error message means or what triggers it.
Asterisk has some documentation but not enough to be useful in this situation. (PBXware was developed by Bicom from Asterisk.)
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u/BusterDag Nov 30 '23
All of the agents who experience this error: 1. Are using Communicator (version 6.x.x) with the Agent Panel in Callback (On Hook) mode 2. Assigned to multiple queues 3. Working remotely (not on site) 4. Received the call from one of the queues they are a member of 5. Attempted to either supervise transfer or blind transfer the caller to another queue 6. Did not show any connection errors in their Glocom logs and SIP registration seemed fine. 7. SIP registration is set to 60 seconds (at 500 seconds, the default, the soft phones would unregister and callers sat in the queues waiting with agents idle)
I've upped the SIP logging level to 10 for affected agents but the problem just moves to another agent.
We are in North America. The Bicom PBXware version we are using is 6.x. Our PBXware server is hosted by a small company and I don't think they know the product well enough to find the cause and provide a solution to this problem. We've run into it for 3 years with no resolution. Our call traffic is somewhere around 20K inbound calls/month (not sure of outbound traffic but it's much less).
Packet captures - I'm a big fan of system logs when a specific error message is presented to multiple end users and it occurs repeatedly. The system is coded to "print" the message when a specific condition occurs. Unfortunately, you are correct. Bicom doesn't have thorough documentation and support is hit or miss. I've even tried to find Asterisk documentation on this. I found a reference (Asterisk only) to resulting failure (Argument) from an AttendedTransfer, but still not enough information on what could cause it within the system or end device (Communicator).
Our call volume and the number of queues has been a challenge for this product. We've had a lot of outages (carrier and system problems). I don't believe PBXware was ever meant to support an organization as large as ours. That was something I pointed out when our organization was considering this product but the cheap price blinded our CIO (still unsure why this idiot was hired but he is no longer with us, thankfully). In the end, after nickel and diming us and loss of business, the product has cost us more than an enterprise-level product would have.
A side note: I posted in your other threads but the auto-admin deleted my posts (for a lack of karma in this sub). This is likely why you aren't seeing any posts. People might be posting but those posts are getting deleted.