Is there a way to make the caller id transfer to the extension when dialed by the receptionist? i.e. external call comes in and the receptionist answers the call (we are not allowed to use an IVR) she then discovers who the caller needs to speak with and then transfer the call to an extension. The way it is now the receptionists ID shows up on the extensions phone and not the outside caller?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
How are you transferring the call? Blind/Supervised? SIP/res_features/AMI?
Blind SIP and AMI transfers seem to do what you want, anyway.
SIP supervised transfers are never going to do it, as the PABX does not know that the calls are related until one completes the transfer, but you need the CLI when first ringing the destination.
Thank you for responding. I am sorry, but I am a newbie to this. What do you mean by “but you need the CLI when first ringing the destination”.
I would like to know the solution to this as well. Blind transfers pass the correct caller ID as you would expect, but in our case the receptionist must first speak to the internal account manager before passing the call over, so has to use an attended transfer.
How can I get the correct caller ID on the account manager’s handset?
The caller ID is sent to the phone before it starts ringing.
When you make a SIP supervised transfer, the phone starts a completely new call, with its caller ID, so the phone indicates a caller ID just the same as for a non-transfer call from that phone.
When you complete the transfer, the phone sends a message saying please subsititute the connection that it has made to the callee for the connection it currently has with the caller. Only at that point can the PABX reliably associate the two calls. That means that there is no way of indicating the caller to the callee until the transfer is completed.
However, what looks like one call through the PABX is actually two calls; one to the PABX and one from it. The calls that get reconfigured are the ones between the operator and the PABX. There is no change in the calls between the PABX and caller or callee, so there is no opportunity to update the phone number.
For a res_features transfer, Asterisk is more aware of their being a transfer in progress, so the behaviour may be different.