Telecom For Dummies

Troubleshooting Toll-Free Issues from Canada, Alaska, and Hawaii

Troubleshooting toll-free issues is difficult enough, but it gets even worse when the problematic calls are unique to areas outside of the lower 48 U.S. states. Your first order of business is to confirm that the toll-free number covers the areas in question. When your business was started, maybe Canada or Hawaii weren’t part of your target market. As your company grows, you find a demographic in one of these areas that is a perfect fit with your company’s business plan. Contact your long-distance carrier to validate the area of coverage on your toll-free numbers and open up the coverage to the area as soon as you identify the need.

 Remember  The process of adding coverage to your toll-free service takes as long as three to five days, so it is best to deal with it immediately, before you have a squad of executives at a hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, wondering why they can’t call back into the office. If the execs are on a short business trip, you might get the toll-free numbers working from Canada — just about the time they land on their flight home.

 Tip  This advice may seem simple, but don’t assume that your service coverage includes calls outside the continental U.S. If you first confirm that your toll-free numbers have been set up for calls from these outlying areas, you can make things happen much quicker.

To simplify the troubleshooting examples here, I use the scenario that one of your toll-free numbers isn’t accepting calls from Canada. The troubleshooting scenario is roughly the same for any of the other areas, including Alaska, Hawaii, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.

Getting a sample troubleshooting scenario for outlying areas

Maybe your toll-free number was working before, or maybe it was set up to receive calls from Canada a while ago but you never verified this access. Whatever the issue, calls from Canada are not reaching your toll-free number. Almost all the issues concerning outlying areas have the same profile, regardless of location:

• The toll-free number being dialed is supposed to be open for calls from the area.

• The toll-free number works from everywhere in the lower 48 states.

• When calling the toll-free number from Canada, callers hear a recording such as, “The number you have dialed is unavailable from your calling area.”

• The person having the problem with the number is unavailable for retesting.

• You have limited or no information about the dates, times, and phone numbers of the calls that are failing from Canada. Your executives at the trade show don’t care about the details; they just want the darn thing fixed.

If you look at the situation from a troubleshooting standpoint, it might seem like you’re in a hopeless situation. You have an irritable person in a remote location on a tight timeline who can’t give you any details about the failed call and who is essentially unavailable for scheduling any future testing. On top of that, the person is probably in a position of power at the company and your life may be affected in a direct (and negative) manner if you can’t fix the problem. Your carrier wants specific call examples and call treatments, and has questions in need of answers. After your customer service representative realizes that you have none of this information, that will be the end of the conversation.

 Remember  Most long-distance carriers don’t directly handle coverage on their toll-free numbers from outlying areas such as Alaska, Canada, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. As a general rule, they use an underlying carrier who has already made all the connections in those areas. This means that there are two systems that need to be in synch: Your carrier must list the toll-free number as having access from the outlying area, and the underlying carrier for that outlying area must have your toll-free number listed for coverage in the area and on the account for your long-distance carrier. If the underlying carrier in Canada doesn’t have your number listed for service with your long-distance carrier, calls to your toll-free number will fail in Canada and never reach your carrier.

Fabricating a call example

What I am about to propose is top secret. The likelihood that there is one area in Canada where the underlying carrier isn’t processing your toll-free calls is quite slim. It’s much more common for the underlying carrier in Canada to somehow drop your number from its records and now calls aren’t being sent from anywhere in Canada to your long-distance carrier in the U.S. Fixing this specific problem takes a few hours. Your carrier simply needs to send an order to the underlying carrier in Canada to place the number back online.

After the underlying carrier updates its system, the situation is resolved. The only problem with this scenario is that if you try to ask someone in the order entry department at your long-distance carrier to resend the order for Canada coverage back to their underlying carrier, the carrier rep will see that it’s already set up for Canada coverage. The rep might be unable, or unwilling, to order service that already appears to be in place. In the eyes of the rep, the job is done. At this point, the rep refers you to speak to a customer service agent to open a trouble ticket. This is not what you need! In order to have your carrier do what needs to be done, you first need to fabricate a call example.

 Warning!  Don’t fabricate call examples under any other circumstances, because doing so will only frustrate you and your carrier, delaying the repair of your problem! The only reason this strategy is acceptable is because:

• The carrier needs to get its records up to date. If you suspect the underlying carrier simply has to update its records to bring the toll-free number on to the account for your long-distance carrier, fabricate away.

• You can’t get a call example any other way. If the underlying carrier isn’t routing the calls to your long-distance carrier, your long-distance carrier won’t find a valid call example. If the call is stopped before it reaches your long-distance carrier’s network, they have no way to trace it, which is the conclusion you are leading them to by making up a fake call example.

• It’s standard procedure for most long-distance carriers to resend the order for coverage to the underlying carrier in this instance. If there is a trouble ticket on a toll-free number that can’t complete from an outlying area, and the carrier can’t find the call example, the technicians will suspect the underlying carrier.

If you’re ready to call your long-distance carrier and give the person you speak with a falsified call example, you need to make the fake calls sound as legitimate as possible. Your fictitious call example should look something like this:

• Say that the time of call is about 90 minutes ago. Give a distinct time, like 11:27 a.m. or 1:35 p.m. The more precise you are, the more likely the call example will go through unquestioned.

• Say that the call treatment is “The number you are dialing is unavailable from your calling area.” Choose this recorded message to lead the technician to the conclusion that the order to the underlying carrier needs to be resent. Any other call treatment you give will focus attention elsewhere.

• Use a plausible origination phone number. Whether you make up the number or use one that is frequently dialed, this is the most crucial part of your fictitious call example. Your carrier is going to search for calls from that phone number, so if you give a completely bogus phone number, you will hear back two hours later that your origination number is invalid, and you will have lost time. You must have a legitimate origination phone number.

   Tip  If you don’t have any reference number in Canada to use as an origination number, you need to find one. The easiest way to pull up a valid phone number in Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, or any outlying area, is to search the Internet. If you know the person is in Alberta, Canada, and can’t reach your toll-free number, just search the Web for alberta canada museums or alberta canada university. Eventually, you will find a home page that displays a local number for either the museum gift shop or the student housing coordinator of the university. It doesn’t matter who the number belongs to, as long as it’s a valid number.

After you have the phone number, write it in your call example, and dial your long-distance carrier. If you want to add some spice to the story, you can always tell the carrier that your CEO is the one who dialed from this number. Say, “If you could move this along, I may be able to keep my job for a little longer.”

In a few hours, your customer service technician calls back to tell you that he or she couldn’t find your call example, but that the order has been resent to the underlying carrier. In an hour or so after that, you can retest the toll-free number from Canada.

At this time, you need to ask the executive in Alberta to try the call again. If it fails again, tell the executive you need the origination phone number, the time of the call, and the exact recording or call treatment. In the vast majority of the cases, the fake call example solves this type of problem. If it doesn’t, you need to gather legitimate information and push forward. As long as you take good notes, follow up on the ticket, and have someone who can work with you to make test calls in the affected area, there is no problem that can’t be resolved.