Dial 0 for operator not working externally

Question

We have a Deployment with Lync and UM enabled with Exchange, both 2013. When we dial the number of a person in a response group and cannot reach him/her we get the Voicemail auto attendant, also we get the message "To speak to an operator press 0". If we press 0 from an Internal phone it dials back again to the response group number, hence we get the response group auto attendant. However if we do this from an external number we get "Sorry I couldn't transfer your call" message. Has anybody experienced this issue? We have checked the dial codes configured and the dialing rules set on the UM Dial plan, and everything seems to be set to allow outgoing calls.

Answer 1

I was unfamiliar with the scenario you described, because it's clearly bouncing between Lync Response Groups and Exchange UM.

Here's what I think:

I suspect you have an Exchange UM CallAnsweringRule configured on UserX's mailbox. It's configured to do the "To speak to an Operator, Press 0" action, and then transfers back to a configured extension, the Response Group. I would suspect the format of the extension configured in the rule is something that can't resolve from Exchange UM to go back to Lync Server.

Perhaps you have two Exchange UM endpoints? One internal and one external? I'm really guessing here. You should be able to test by dialing into EUM directly (not a user extension, but the Subscriber Access number) from the outside, and try to transfer to a Lync-only extension. If that fails, start tracing.