Delays when trying to answer an incoming call cloudpbx

Brass Contributor

I'm having multiple reports of multiple sites/tenants having an strange issue with trying to answer a call.  When they get an incomming call, this can be direct or call queue transfer, there is a delay when they try picking up the call.  I.E. I get an incomming call.  I get a new Skype for business notification.  I click on that notification to answer the call and there is a long delay and the call never establishes. This is happening for different users, different sites as well as for different tenants.  All users are using Cloudpbx.  Personally I have not been able to catch this in action yet.

 

Without purchasing expressroute for these sites, what are my options to speed up this pickup time?  

What could be the cause of these type of delays?

Does the notification of a new call come in on a different port or does it follow the normal sip ports.  

-I know audio and video data comes in on completely different ports.  (In the 50000 range)

Has anyone else ran into this yet?   

One customer is using Polycom bToe setup and the other is using softphones.

26 Replies

Thanks for the feedback on this!  I finally was able to get a solid answer from Microsoft that this is a known issue and they have the fix "on the roadmap." There is no solid date for fixing this, but they are trying to fix it before the end of the year.  Of course, this is coming from an engineer and not a public statement so take it with a grain of salt.

 

Statement from a Microsoft engineer:

 

As discussed, this is something which is an ongoing issue in Online Auto-Attendant. As you are well aware that this feature is recently introduced in the Online and the engineering team is working on it.

 

The delay of calls in the call queue (something around 5seconds) is a known issue and the engineering team is already aware about the same. We have also raised our concern since we had multiple queries regarding the delay earlier. It has been reduced than before and still the scope is to reduce it lesser than 2 seconds and as I mentioned the team is working on it and we do not have an ETA for now.

 

I sincerely apologies for that and at present we do not have a work around to overcome this situation. However, once this is fixed or we get any update from the backend, we will keep you updated on the same.

 

But soon we can expect that the delay will be reduced lesser than two seconds.

 

However, I request you to add your valuable feedback in the below link which will be viewed by Product level group directly and we can expected this sooner.

 

https://www.skypefeedback.com/

 

Soooo I guess I'll watch the forums to see when this issue has been resolved.

I've got roughly the same answer from multiple support folks over at MS, and escalated as far as it would go.  Hopefully this gets solved relatively soon.

We implemented this fix with our customer to get around the problem in the short term.  We have had Microsoft give us 3 trail E5 and calling plan licenses to get this implemented (1 E5 for each of the office locations/ring groups).  This actually works very well except for the potential long term maintenance of the solution and the wasted license cost of a dummy user and plan.  We are hoping that Microsoft can fix this prior to year end so we don't have to go back to the customer and have them pay $150/month to get around an obvious design flaw with the auto attendant.  If there is a way to have "free licenses" for this type of situation, that would be great so the pressure on Microsoft getting this fixed can be lessened.

We still see significant media establishment delays (4-5+ seconds) for incoming calls to call queues.

 

Supposedly the latest Polycom firmware (5.7.0) fixes this issue on Polycom's end (issue EN-32447) -- but we've deployed that firmware and don't see any changes -- Call Queue answering still has a huge delay.

 

Has anyone heard more about this issue?

We have been working with MS advanced support.  They have acknowledged the problem and are working to get the delay down to 2 seconds.  There is no ETA at this point.  

We are having the same issue.  Any word from Microsoft support?  Is there a case number associated with this that we can call in on to find out the status?  Thank you!

This issue is still outstanding.  Microsoft is reporting any solutions to this posting.  The last update we received as mid December.  All I know is that they are still working on a solution.

I don't get it, in what planet is a 5 second delay even remotely acceptable?  This problem has existed for some time and the very least Microsoft can do is publicy provide updates on a regular basis.

When callers call the main number, the Auto Attendant redirects the call to a Call Queue which takes between 7 to 30 seconds for the actual call to flow to the users.

This is so frustrating to our customers and us as an MSP. Microsoft Phone System needs some serious attention. There are a lot of issues that haven't been addressed since Skype for Business (Lync) online went GA.

After contacting Microsoft, here is what I got from them:

"Hi Hacene,
I spoke with my Senior Engineering Team and they stated that "confirmed unfortunately we can control the transfer time since it is based on phone lines".  Unfortunately, there isn't any setting that can be put in place to control the timing.  My suggestion would be to use the following link:  

User Voicehttps://www.skypefeedback.com/

This is how MS engineers know what the user base is requesting and the more votes a suggestion has the more MS will listen.  I apologize for the inconvenience. 

Thank you,

Office 365 Support"

I have had this issue logged thru Microsoft Advanced support and the development team for nearly a year now.  This is the kind of thing that the product needs to resolve before it can be realistically sold to customers of any size.

Add me to the frustrated partner/msp. Jan - Aug 2018. Finally I see it is the norm. Very sad. My first phone deployment and my last since issues not resolved. Any help is appreciated.

We have tested this again in the past 60 days.  The delay that we were seeing has been reduced to about 2 seconds.  This is much better than it was before.  In some cases, this is still very annoying to people who are used to just picking up the phone and talking.  It takes some training to wait for a second or two to start talking.  

Thank you for your timely response.  If I had a constant 2 second delay, we would happily live with that.  Our issue definitely relate to going through the queue.  We have tested a number of different ways over the last seven months.  We could do a direct dial to the DID to the user and no problems.  I should mention (if I haven't already) we have all Polycom VVX phones with the latest versions.  310s, 501s, and a 601 for the receptionist.  We removed the headset from the 601 in case that was it.  We have a delay that can go as long as 5 to 6 second and then continue to ring on the others in the main queue.  I have had every vendor involved from Comcast, WatchGuard, Netgear, Polycom (numerous tickets), and Microsoft (more than numerous tickets).  Any insight or ideas I am open to listen.  At this point I would be happy to be the one who misconfigured things as long as it worked.

 

I mainly wanted to say thank you for the response, not go into my frustration.

 

David M.

In our experience, the queue delays had nothing to do with phones or internet providers.  This was strictly a bug at Microsoft.  If you have Advanced Support from Microsoft, ask for Julie and she might be able to help if you reference my name and this post.  I wonder if your data center has not been updated yet.  Meanwhile, our fix was relatively easy.  We purchased a E3,Skype Addon and Domestic Calling plan for a dummy user.  We funneled all outside calls to that user thru the normally configured call queue.  We then configured this user thru the Skype client to be part of a team and to have other users phones ring at the same time as the dummy user.  What this basically does, is that the dummy user "absorbs" that long wait to "answer" the phone.  As soon as the delay period is complete, all people configured to be part of the team will have their phones ring.  So no one on site really knows this delay even exists.  The person calling in experiences a longer wait time for someone to answer, but that has not been a huge issue in the site that we did this for.  Hopefully that helps until Microsoft can roll out the fix to your area.

Hello Tom and Everyone,

 

Thanks for the post! This is exactly what I did to address the delay issue for now. However, that is not ideal in cases where you need more complex call routing. In fact, I encountered issues with voicemail and other routing issues. I hope Microsoft fixes this and makes Skype for Business (Phone System) usable. Otherwise, we might just stop recommending it and even deploying it.

 

Hacene Djelid

I have four customers on SfBO voice and they all experience about 4 seconds delay when answering a call queue. I was hoping it would be fixed with Teams, but my initial testing on Teams is a 6 to 7 second answer delay on call queues.

If it does get worse with Teams it will be a deal killer for us.

Dave
After a year of problems, my client has decided to pull the plug. SfB is the worse experience I have ever had with technology and Microsoft support all the way to tier 3. Polycom has been the only company actually showing a desire to resolve to the point of setting up in their labs to recreate.