How to set up call groups (hunt groups) to ring teams of users

Overview

Call Groups (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 Call Groups.

• Call Groups are predominately a PBX/phone system feature designed to quickly connect customers to any available person in a team (such as sales). 
• Call Groups 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 Call Groups, 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 other Call Group (such as reception), or send the caller to an external number (such as your Contact Center).

Spoke Call Groups also allow for queuing. Spoke's Call Group Call Queuing is for when no one is available to take a call in your Call Group (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 call group, assign a DDI, and add users as members of the call group. It contains the following sections:

• Add or edit a call group
• Assign a DDI number to a call group
• Add users to a call group
• Call Group limitations

Add or edit a call group

1. Login to the Spoke Phone account portal and go to Call groups > Manage call groups
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 Call Group 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 call group, scroll down. 

*The Reception Call Group 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 call group

1. In the online account portal, navigate to manage call groups
2. Find the call group you want, click the edit pencil 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 call group.
6. When added, the user will have call first turned on by default. When call first is on, this means that the user will be offered the call before anyone in the call group who does not have call first on.

Setting the Call Group rules

See How to set call group calling rules.

Assign a DDI (direct-dial-in) number to a call group

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 call group, 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 call group, then select it from the dropdown list. 
5. Click select, then save changes. 

Call Group limitations

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