BCDental, from what you’ve described, this honestly sounds more like a Cloud Voice provisioning or directory sync issue rather than something you configured incorrectly on the phones themselves.
The “Phonebook connect error” on Yealink devices usually happens when the handset cannot properly connect to the remote directory service. Even when group contacts are created correctly in the portal, they sometimes don’t sync unless the directory permissions and provisioning are fully applied to every extension.
I’d check whether all five phones are running the same firmware version and confirm the shared directory is assigned to each user profile individually. I’ve seen cases where the contacts existed in the portal but never appeared on the devices because the provisioning push failed in the background.
After changes are made, Yealink phones can also take a bit of time to fully sync. Rebooting helps, but sometimes BT support has to manually re-provision the configuration from their side before everything starts working properly.
A lot of cloud managed systems work this way now where backend syncing is critical for shared access across multiple users, similar to how businesses handling coordinated services like deck maintenance Baltimore operations rely on centralized systems to keep teams and scheduling synced correctly.
At this point, I’d definitely contact BT Cloud Voice support directly and ask them to check the remote directory provisioning for the Yealink handsets because the “connect error” normally points to the phones failing to pull the shared directory feed from the server side.
