Administering Automatic Route Selection (Ars) 5; How Ars Works 5 - AT&T MERLIN 3070 Administration Manual

ADMINISTERING AUTOMATIC ROUTE SELECTION (ARS)
Using the most economical method available to place each business call can mean
significant savings for your company. Routing calls efficiently is especially impor-
tant if you have several different line pools, such as local, WATS, Foreign Exchange
(FX), or tie lines, or if you use an alternate long distance company. The ARS feature
lets you specify how you want toll calls (calls for which an area code is dialed) and
local calls (calls that don't require dialing an area code) to be routed to minimize costs
for your business.
How ARS Works
With ARS in place, people in your business simply touch the Pool Access button and
dial the telephone numbers they want to reach, without selecting particular line pools
or dialing special routing digits. Your MERLIN system directs the call to the line pool
that you have designated in your ARS tables as the best one for that type of call. If
all the lines in your first-choice line pool are busy, the system routes the call to your
second-choice line pool, and so on.
If a trunk line is busy, the caller hears a recorded "all circuits are busy" message.
If this happens, the caller just touches the Pool Access button again to route the call
to the next entry in the list of line pools that you have specified.
If you are using ARS, all callers must:
Dial a toll prefix (0 or 1) before dialing a long distance call.
Use the dialing pattern that you specify whenever they make calls that will be
placed on special-purpose lines such as tie lines and FX lines. For example,
if you setup a routing pattern for calls on your FX line pool that includes a leading
1 and the area code, callers must dial all 11 digits to place those calls.
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