How this Feature will help you

It can increase the likelihood of your incoming calls getting answered by spreading them across one of your teams, such as sales or support.

It can work well if you don’t get many calls and have staff available to answer them quickly, providing you’re happy for callers to hear ringing until their call is picked up. If you receive lots of calls and need to queue people while playing hold music with comfort announcements, then the Call centre Feature would be a better option. 

When a call is received to a Hunt Group, the feature ‘hunts’ for an available person based on the settings you input for that particular group.

How to set up and use this Feature

Click on the Hunt Group settings icon on the Features page.

Select ‘Add Hunt Group’.

Details

Type in a name for your group. Doing this will automatically create a Hunt Group ID which will appear on billing reports, you can amend this if you prefer.

Add your calling line ID first and second name. This is displayed on a User’s Device or Application when the Hunt Group receives an incoming call. It will help your Users, especially those in multiple Hunt Groups, answer the call correctly, e.g. ‘Hello, you’re through to the (‘Support’ or ‘Sales’) team, how can I help you?’.

If you want to use this Feature for external calls, select a public phone number from the drop-down menu. This is the number you advertise to outside callers and must be assigned to the Site and not to a User or another Feature.

If it’s for internal use only, select ‘no number’ and type in the extension you wish to use.

Choose either ‘None’ or ‘Plus’ in the Feature pack drop-down menu, plus provides you with advanced features – then click ‘Continue’.

Hunt Group Plus

The plus pack may be chargeable, please ensure you check with your Service Provider. 

‘Plus’ gives you greater flexibility by providing the following advanced call functionality:

• Alternate numbers
• Call forwarding
• Call forwarding selective
• Custom ring back
• Do not disturb
• Pre alerting announcement
• Selective call acceptance
• Selective call rejection
• Voicemail 

Call settings

Call distribution

Select how and who you’d like the calls to be distributed to:  

• Regular – from your list of Users (this is created once you’ve set up a Hunt Group), the system calls the person at the top first. If they are unavailable, the next person on the list is called, and so on, until the system finds somebody available.
• Circular – the first available User is rung in list order. When answered, the next incoming call will ring the following User in the list and loop around until all Users have been called.
• Uniform – the User that’s been available the longest is rung.
• Simultaneous – all available Users are rung at the same time and the call is connected to whoever answers first.
• Weighted – Users will be rung randomly, but dependant on the weighting you’ve assigned them. For example, a more experienced User would have a higher percentage of calls compared to a recently employed one.

Skip to the next agent after

Depending on your chosen call distribution setting, you can now select from the drop-down menu how long it will ring a User, before it passes to the next one.  

Enable Call Waiting

When all Users in a Hunt Group are busy, ‘Call Waiting’ will allow the call to wait for the duration of the default Call Forwarding no answer timer, before the caller hears the busy tone. To enable, tick the box.

Forward calls when there is no answer

If you’d like the incoming call to be forwarded to another phone number if every User in your Hunt Group is busy, simply tick the box. You can then select a time period for when this happens and type in the phone number.

If you have enabled Call Waiting, the call will wait for this time period too.

Forward calls when not reachable

If you know your whole Hunt Group is going to be unavailable, maybe there’s a training day, Users can’t get into the building or contractors drill through the broadband cable, rather than letting customers wait for the call to be forwarded, this will redirect them straight away to a different phone number. Simply tick the box and type in the number.

There’s also an option to make the whole Hunt Group unavailable when at least one User is busy and all others are unreachable. To activate this, just tick the box.

Once you’ve chosen all your options, simple hit ‘Save’.