Hello everyone! I am a digital channels specialist and I am currently troubleshooting a weird issue where our agents are unable to perform ‘External Transfers’ to our secondary support center. When the agent tries to transfer the call, the customer hears a busy signal and the agent sees a ‘Transfer Failed’ error. We are using a BYOC Cloud trunk with a SIP-based carrier. Could this be related to the ‘SIP REFER’ setting on our trunk, or is it a problem with how our carrier handles call hair-pinning?
Hey Ste94! I am a change management specialist and I have seen these transfer issues cause a lot of frustration for our agents. Most modern cloud carriers do not support ‘SIP REFER’ for security reasons. You should check your trunk configuration and ensure that ‘Take Back and Transfer’ is disabled. This forces Genesys Cloud to ‘Hair-Pin’ the call, meaning it stays on the trunk and just opens a new leg to the destination. It uses twice the bandwidth but it is much more reliable than relying on the carrier to handle the REFER.
I maintain over fifty flows and I have seen these hair-pinning issues eat up our trunk capacity during peak hours. To follow up on Hay63, make sure you have enough ‘Concurrent Call’ licenses on your trunk to handle both legs of the transferred call. If you are close to your limit, the transfer will fail because there is no available capacity for the second leg. I always recommend monitoring your ‘Trunk Utilization’ metrics in the Performance dashboards to catch this before it becomes an issue.
Greetings. I am a security officer and I want to add a note about ‘Call Privacy’. When you hair-pin a call for an external transfer, the audio is still passing through your Genesys Cloud organization. If you have ‘Recording’ enabled, make sure you have a policy that stops the recording before the transfer happens, or you might accidentally record sensitive information being shared with the external party. This is a very common compliance gap in many organizations!