Cannot Make Outbound Calls Through Playbooks - Agent Phone Does Not Connect or Ring

Overview

You are not able to make calls through the Playbooks application. It does not dial out or calls are not connecting to your cell phone or softphone. You are experiencing call failures and issues with outbound calls when trying to call through Playbooks. You cannot make calls, and:

• You receive a fast busy tone when placing calls.
• It takes several seconds or a few minutes for calls to load or dial out.
• Calls from your cell phone are not connecting or ringing through correctly.
• You get an error: "the number never being added in Playbooks".
• You get voicemail from your own number and calls don't get bridged to Zoom.
• After hitting the dial button, Playbooks does not connect to your phone or softphone application.
• Playbooks tries to dial out but your phone does not ring and after some time Playbooks times out.

Solution

1. Make sure the phone you are calling to is correct and properly formatted.
   
   Playbooks Requires the E.164 Standard Format, which is an international standard for phone number formats, consisting of:
   [+] [country code] [subscriber number including area code]
   

   • Must start with a plus sign (+).
   • Maximum of 15 digits, excluding the country code prefix.
   • Does not include an exit code.
2. Check the Agent's phone number configured in your settings - it must match your phone number to be able to make calls.
   
   
3. Clear cache & cookies and Site Data in Chrome and then restart Chrome and Playbooks.
   
4. If your Agent Leg doesn’t ring even though it appears you are on a call in Playbooks, it means that you are experiencing a stuck Agent Leg - Playbooks thinks your agent phone is connected when it isn’t.
   
   Please try disconnecting your Agent Leg Connection manually and then make a call again.
5. If you are using your cell phone to make calls, try turning off your phone and turning it back on. If there's an issue with your phone, calls might be going straight to voicemail.
   
   
6. If the issue persists and you are using a VOIP softphone or another 3rd-party application (like Zoom, Cisco, Ring Central, Swyxlt, or MS Teams), there might be an issue with the application used for calls - try calling your Agent Number (tied to your softphone) from your cell phone; if calls do not connect, you cannot log in to your softphone app, or there are other issues, reach out to your IT team to further investigate the issue with your softphone.
   
   If you are using a cell phone, try to make a call to your number from another phone (or ask one of your colleagues) and check if calls are being connected. If calls are not connecting, your cell phone may have no coverage (no bars) or there might be other issues with your carrier. In this case, you will need to reach out to your mobile service provider for further investigation.
   
   
7. Additionally, you can check if there is an outage related to your softphone application, service, or carrier (on their official website or Downdetector).
   
   
8. Also, try changing your agent phone to your cell number and make a call from Playbooks again. If this option works, you can use your cell phone number to make calls while your call application or service is not working, and once the call service you are using is working again - switch back to your previous configuration.
   
   
9. You can also try adding the agent leg number (the number from which you usually receive calls from Playbooks) as a contact to your phone to work around your provider's anti-spam system (or your phone may be blocking repeated calls from the same number). More information can be found in the Number is being Blocked article. Using a Custom Caller ID to call your prospects or by asking the prospect to add the number you usually use to call them as a contact to their phone are other workarounds in case your number is being blocked.
   Note: If you are using T-Mobile, remove the agent leg number (usually, it is 12013450841) from the block list in the T-Mobile Scam Shield application (or contact T-Mobile for further assistance).
   
   
10. If your colleagues are having issues making calls as well, check if there is an ongoing maintenance or incident with Playbooks services - visit the Playbooks Status page and subscribe to updates to be informed about planned maintenance and incidents with the product.

<supportagent>

Issues, when customers cannot make calls, may be caused by outages (e.g., INSIDESALES-3052). Check if there are tickets from other customers reporting the same issue with calls, which would indicate that there is an outage. Report the outage to the SaaS team according to the routing table. Make sure to check if there are existing Jira tickets for the outage.
For more information, refer to the Playbooks Sev-1 Handling guide. 

</supportagent>