Call forwarding & hunt groups
Call forwarding or call diverting is crucial to modern day business life to increase the user’s availability to callers and to ensure important calls are not missed. By using call forwarding rather than voicemail, businesses can ensure callers are still dealt with by a person rather than a machine. Incoming calls to an unavailable number can be redirected to another colleague/department or to a mobile/external telephone number where the desired called party is situated.
Diverting calls can increase a user’s availability to a caller. Call forwarding is typically activated in one of the following conditions:-
Divert on busy
Divert on no answer
Divert on busy and no answer
Divert immediately
An alternative destination for the call diversion is to voicemail, albeit some callers do not wish to leave a recorded message, suspecting that the party will delay returning their messages. Furthermore, some businesses find that the human touch can improve contact. Therefore there is also the option to utilise a personal assistant application whereby calls are re-routed to reception or an alternative internal telephone number.
Diversion can be simply activated either from a telephone handset and can be changed remotely by dialing into the system from an external location to change the call diversion destination.
Incoming and internal calls could be directed to a group where all handsets within the group ring simultaneously. If a call to the group remains unanswered, it can divert to a group mailbox facility which will give a visual LED indication that a message has been left on a nominated user’s handset.
Calls can also be forwarded to a group of extension users or a hunt group, rather than to an individual extension. Calls to a hunt group can be programmed to follow a predefined sequence/order of priority to ensure that the most suitable person answers the call wherever possible. The term ‘hunt’ refers to the process in which these calls are received, and this can be carried out in several ways.
Sequential - Calls are distributed to the first extension in the list, and works down.
Cyclic - Calls are distributed in a round-robin style. If a call is delivered to extension one, the next call goes to two, and the next to three, and so on. When the end of the hunt group is reached, the hunting starts again. Extensions are only skipped if they are still busy on a previous call.
Parallel - Calls all the extensions in the hunt group simultaneously.
Sequential, cyclic and parallel hunt groups are a standard feature of most of South West Communications Group’s telephony solutions.
