Inbound Faxing Issues
Inbound issues are almost always impossible for us to resolve especially when they are related to poor line condition or downstream carrier issues. Your clients should be made well aware of this limitation so their expectations are well managed. The problem is that we have far more ability and success to address outbound faxing issues. We can manually force a fax to use a specific carrier as we have multiple carriers we can use. We can also work with our carriers to improve their route to a destination. Plus most of our systems automatically retry these multiple carriers before producing an error when sending out. Inbound calls will never be able to address by us just as simply. There are two main problems.
1) If a call doesn’t hit us then we have no data to understand why.
2) Even if the call does hit us all we can do is send that data to our carrier who will likely ask that the sender re-send their fax.
Inbound delivery is much easily controlled from the source rather than the destination. If a fax hits us but fails to complete it still needs to be re-sent for us to get it. With inbound faxes we not only have less control and less information; we also very little we can actually do about it. While we constantly strive to ensure our systems and services are improved both for quality and reliability it is still possible for downstream carriers to negatively affect fax transmission.
We can get in touch with our inbound carrier as long as we have the information they can use for their investigation. What we need in these cases are specific call examples of the inbound failure. This means the source DID (calling number) and the destination number (your client’s fax number) and the time and day of the call. A few examples would help but they must be no more than 48 hours old. With this information we can at least have the inbound carrier check if the calls hit them. They can work sometimes work with originating carrier, if something fixable is identified, often though trying again is the only option for the sender.
As this can be frustrating for your clients there are also several options that they can elect to use. If they don’t already have a second DID on line2 of their ATA they can use either a Toll Free number of this second line or a local DID from a nearby city or state. Generally as long as the number comes from a different carrier or takes another path it should avoid whatever inbound issue is affecting their primary fax number. Our sales team would be happy to discuss these redundant number options with you.
Providing our support team with as much detailed information as possible and the specific items mentioned above will help us support you and your clients quicker and with better results.