Why We Ask for Call & Fax Examples

When you report a problem with your phone or fax service — choppy audio, dropped calls, one-way audio, a fax that won't go through — the first thing we'll ask for is an example: the specific details of a call or fax that didn't work. This page explains what that means, why we ask, and why, in most cases, we genuinely can't begin investigating without one.

We know it can feel like we're handing the work back to you. We're not — a good example is simply the single most powerful thing that lets us, and our carriers, find and fix the problem fast.

The two forms

If you were given a ticket number, include it when you submit and we'll link your report to it automatically.

What is an "example"?

An example is the set of details that lets us locate one specific call or fax in the records.

For a call, we need:

• The numbers/extensions involved — who called and who was called.
• The date.
• The approximate time — as precise as you can, ideally within a few minutes.
• What went wrong — choppy audio, dropped after X minutes, couldn't hear the other party, etc.

For a fax, we need:

• Your fax number and the other party's fax number.
• The date and approximate time of the attempt(s).
• What happened — failed completely, sent but never received, blank/garbled, partial pages, wouldn't connect.
• Any error code or message the machine or software showed.
• Roughly how many pages, and whether it happens with every fax or just this one.

A couple of real examples beat a general description every time. "Faxes are failing lately" tells us there's a problem but gives us nowhere to look. "On June 23rd around 10:35am we tried to fax 6 pages from 250-555-0100 to 250-555-0142 and got Comm. Error 232" tells us exactly what to pull up.

Why we ask for them

Every call and fax passes through several systems — your equipment and network, our platform, and one or more carriers that connect it out to the rest of the world. Each system keeps a detailed log of every call, called a call detail record (CDR), plus deeper technical traces of how it was set up and how the audio or fax data flowed.

The catch is volume. A single business line can carry hundreds or thousands of calls in a day; across all our customers it's far more. Those logs are searched by who contacted whom, and when. With that, we can pull up your exact call or fax in seconds and see everything that happened to it. Without it, we're searching for one event in an enormous haystack with no idea which one you mean.

The symptom also doesn't point to the cause on its own. Choppy audio, one-way audio, and dropped calls can each come from very different places — your local network, a routing issue, or something on the carrier's side. Faxing is even more delicate: it depends on a clean, uninterrupted connection and a successful negotiation between the two machines, and a failure can come from the sending side, the receiving side, or anywhere in between. The only way to tell these apart is to examine the actual event, and that's what the example unlocks.

Why our carriers require them

For problems that turn out to be upstream — out on the public network rather than on your equipment or ours — we have to open a trouble ticket with the carrier that handles that part of the connection. This is non-negotiable on their end: carriers will not investigate a call or fax they can't identify.

When we open a ticket with a carrier, the very first thing they ask for is the originating number, the destination number, the date, and the time (with time zone). They use exactly those details to find the event in their own switch records and trace it. If we can't give them a specific example, they have nothing to search for, and the ticket goes nowhere — often it's simply closed as unactionable.

So an example isn't just helpful to us internally. It's the key that lets us escalate on your behalf and get the people who actually control that segment of the network to look into it.

Why we basically can't do anything without one

It comes down to three things:

1. We can't find it. No example means no record to pull, no signaling to inspect, no audio or fax path to analyze. There's nothing concrete to investigate.
2. We can't tell which problem it is. The same symptom can have several different causes, diagnosed in different places. Without the actual call or fax, any guess is just a guess.
3. We can't escalate. Carriers won't open or progress an investigation without a specific event to identify, so we hit a wall immediately.

This is especially true for intermittent problems — the kind that happen sometimes but not always. Those are the hardest to catch precisely because we can't make them happen on demand to watch them. A few real examples are often the only way to catch an intermittent issue in the act. (Fax is notorious for this: it often fails only to specific destinations, so the "every fax or just this one?" detail genuinely matters.)

How to give us a great example

The more precise the example, the faster the fix. When you notice a problem:

• Jot it down right away — the numbers involved, the date, and the time. A quick note in the moment beats trying to remember later.
• Be as exact on the time as you can. "Around 10:35am" is great; "sometime this morning" is much harder to work with.
• Capture any error message exactly as it appears (especially for faxes).
• Send more than one if it's happening repeatedly. Two or three examples help us spot the pattern.
• Note whether it happens every time or only to certain numbers — this alone often points straight at the cause.

The forms above walk you through all of this. The few minutes it takes to capture a good example is almost always the difference between a problem we can resolve and one we're stuck on.