How to Set Up Teams (hunt groups) to Ring Teams of Users

Overview

Teams (sometimes known as hunt groups or ACD), offer customer calls to groups of users and/or devices.  For instance, sales, customer support, and reception desk are good examples of Teams.

• Teams are predominately a PBX/phone system feature designed to quickly connect customers to any available person in a team (such as sales). 
• Teams differ from Contact Center Call Queues, in that Contact Center Call Queues are designed to connect a caller to the best available and most appropriately skilled agent. 

With Spoke Teams, if no one is available or no one answers within a period that you define, you can send callers to the group's voicemail, roll the caller over to another team (such as reception), or send the caller to an external number (such as your Contact Center).

Spoke Teams also allow for queuing. Spoke's Team Call Queuing is for when no one is available to take a call in your Team (perhaps everyone is on the phone), then rather than sending the caller immediately to voicemail, another group, or number, the caller is kept in a "queue" waiting for someone to hang up and become available to take the call.

This article will show you how to create a team, assign a DDI, and add users as members of the team. It contains the following sections:

• Add or edit a team
• Assign a DDI number to a team
• Add users to a team
• Teams limitations

Add or edit a Team

1. Login to the Spoke Phone account portal and go to Teams > Manage teams
2. Click the pencil icon to edit the default reception group (this group cannot be deleted*)
3. Or click + add group to create a new one.
4. Enter a name for the group.
5. We will show you this name when you get an incoming call for this group.
   
   
6. If you have built your IVR on Twilio Studio, you can ignore this section:
   1. If you are using the basic automated IVR on Spoke Phone:
      1. entering a number into the 'IVR key' field will make this Team available as an option for customers to select.
      2. If you want to hide this option from callers, leave this field blank.
         
         
7. Click 'next', or if you are editing an existing team, scroll down. 

*The Reception team is a system default and cannot be deleted. 

Zero (0) is a fixed IVR number assigned to the Reception group and cannot be removed
or changed to another number. 

However, you can edit and change any other settings for the Reception group
according to your business requirements. 

Add users to a team

1. In the online account portal, navigate to Manage Teams
2. Find the team you want, click the  edit  pencil icon on the far right.
3. Scroll down to the panel "members who will get rung when people call this group".
4. Click on "start typing to select users to add to the group" and start typing in the name of a user.
5. Select the user from the list to add them to the team
6. When added, the user will have call first turned on by default. When call first is enabled, this means that the user will be offered the call before anyone in the team who does not have call first enabled.

Setting the Team rules

See How to set team calling rules.

Assign a DDI (direct-dial-in) number to a Team

You can assign a DDI (direct-dial-in) number that calls this group directly, bypassing the auto-attendant / IVR. 

1. Scroll to the very bottom of the page and click on the orange 'link number' button. 
2. Find the number you want to assign to the team, and click the edit pencil icon. 
3. Find the field assigned to and click on the current value to change this (default value is 'All Locations').
4. Start typing the name of your team, then select it from the dropdown list. 
5. Click select, then save changes. 

Teams limitations

• You can create as many Teams as you need
• Each Team automatically gets a unique extension number assigned, that you can change
• If you are using the automated IVR in Spoke, you can have up to eight Teamsassigned as part of the IVR (e.g. Press 1 for Sales, 2 for Support, etc.).  Customers can still dial all other Teams simply by entering the team's extension number.
• By default, Teams are limited to 10 members. Contact your Spoke Phone Account Manager to change this limit. See Increasing Maximum Team Membership.
• By default, Team Call Queuing is limited to five people in the Queue. Contact your Spoke Phone Account Manager to change this limit. 
• By default, Team to Team forwarding is limited to five forwards (to protect the integrity of the customer experience), Contact your Spoke Phone Account Manager to change this limit.