Does your company need a call center queue, a ring group or a hunt group? | The Best Business Phone Systems

Your company is in the market for a new phone system, but as you’re shopping around, you’re not sure if you should be asking for a call center queue, a ring group, or a hunt group?

In this video, I explain which one best fits your company.

Want my recommendations on the Best Business Phone Systems to quote? Click the button below to ask me today.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

your companies in the market for a new phone system. And one of the things that you’re wondering is should you be asking vendors to give you information about a call center queue or a hunt group or a ring group? What does your company actually use today? Do you use a call center queue and you need to get a new one?

Or are you using a ring group or a hunt group? Well, don’t worry. In this video, I’m going to explain the differences between the three, and I’ll make this really easy for you.

My recommendations on the best business phone system

But first, if you’d like my recommendation on the best business phone system vendors, your company should be quoting. Send me an email. Give me a call (714.593.0011). I love to help you, especially if you have 50 or more employees. That’s my specialty. And I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. I will help you make a lot better decision in a fraction of the time. More information on that at the end of the video. Also, don’t forget to check out our website Aerocominc.com. On our website you can browse business phone system vendors and you can filter them by feature.

You can read reviews on them, you can watch videos on them, and you can read all types of information on the different vendors, which is a nice place to start. Sometimes even before you contact me, but at some point you’re probably going to need my recommendation, so don’t forget to do that. Also, as always, don’t forget to hit the like and subscribe and ring button and that’ll help our videos get out to more people. So I’d really appreciate it.

Do you need a call center queue, ring group, or hunt group?

So what is the difference between a call queue and a ring group and a hunt group? So your business right now has people calling in and you’re you’re receiving those calls and maybe a group of people are receiving those calls, but you don’t know how you’re distributing those calls to those people. I mean, you kind of think of it as a queue, but it’s kind of a distribution group call distribution group is it called the Ringer punk group? Like what? You know, what is it that you should be looking for as you look for this new phone system in terms of making your companies requirements? Well, there are some major differences. So you want to make sure you’re asking for the correct thing, and I’ll explain those in this video.

Call Queue: Callers sit in queue

So let’s cover first and foremost call center cuz call center queues are unique in that when a call comes in and it hits the queue, the caller is going to hear hold music while they wait for that call to be assigned to a specific user. And then that user picks up the phone. So that’s one of the basics of an actual call queue for a call center.

Call Queue: Reporting & Alerts

Another basic is that you’re going to have available to you both historical reporting on the queue and also real time reporting on the queue. For instance, how many people are sitting in hold on you in the queue right now, so maybe you want some alerts to go out. So if you exceed a certain threshold in the call queue, like we have ten people sitting in the queue and they’ve been on hold, we have somebody who’s been on hold for 10 minutes that exceeds our threshold. We want to alert a manager to get somebody else to log into the queue so we relieve some of that, some of that wait time. So that’s again, another thing that you can only do in a call center queue some of the historical poor reporting. You can only do with a call center queue are things like average time in queue. So if you want to know like how long are people typically sitting on hold before somebody answers the phone, that’s a report that you’re going to only be able to get with a call center queue.

Call Queue: Barge & Whisper

Another thing that you can only do with call center cues is barge monitor, whisper for training. So if you want a manager to be able to listen in on the call and maybe take the call over if somebody is struggling, if you have a new employee and you’re training them, they want to listen in and then take over the call. That’s only something you can do in a call center queue.

Call Queue: Queued Call Back

Another thing is cued callback. So if you want to give your callers the option of getting a callback, holding their place in queue and having somebody have an agent, call them back when it’s their time in queue, that’s only something you’re going to get in a call center queue.

Also, if you want to trace calls from beginning to end, like when did that call come in? Who did it transfer to it? What point did it drop? Things like that. If you want to trace it all the way from beginning to end, that’s only available in a call center queue along the same lines, if you want to look at calls that are dropped or abandoned, that’s only a report you’re going to be able to pull with call center queuing

Call Queue: Omni-Channel

lastly, some really advanced features. If your company wants to do things like omnichannel, meaning that you want phone calls, emails, text messages, web chat, social media, stuff like that all to be handled in the same pane of glass. That’s called omnichannel. That’s only available in call center queuing.

Call Queue: AI & Workforce Management

Also things like I if you want to know customer sentiment, if you want to automatically score calls, if you want to automatically get automated customer calls, scores populated and if you think you want things like workforce management, you want to be able to predict how many agents you want to have in your office at any one point in time based on seasonality, stuff like that.

All of that is only available in a call center queue. So if you want any of those things for your company, you need to be asking for call center queuing for your next phone system.

What are ring groups and hunt groups?

Well, that’s great. Well, what about ring groups and hunt groups? What’s the differences between those? Well, I’ll make this really easy. A ring group is the same exact thing as a hunt group. It’s just two different terms that people use for call distribution groups. So automatic call distribution groups. So I’m sure you’ve heard of AICD, you can call it an ACD, you can call it a ring group, you can call it a hunt group. It’s all the same thing. And so what that is, it’s just a very basic version of a call center queue. Without those features that I just mentioned.

Ring/Hunt Group: Simultaneous ring, or sequential ring, or longest idle

So what it does is it can either ring all phones at once, like simultaneous ring, and it can also do things like sequential ring like one person at a time. You’ve set up like, Hey, I want you to ring when somebody calls in to our sales department, I want you to ring these people in order one at a time. If this person is not available, ring this next person. If this person rings three times and no pick up, go to the next person. That’s sequential ring. Also, you can do longest idle. So the person who has been has not taken a call for the longest amount of time. That can be, you know, the first person that gets the next call. So those are all ways that calls can be distributed in a ring group one group.

Ring/Hunt Group: No hold music

But the difference is when someone calls in, they just hear ringing. They don’t sit on hold. Music If you want hold music while they wait, that’s a call center queue. That would be the first thing we talked about today, not a ring group or hunt group.

Ring/Hunt Group: No real time reporting

And just to reiterate with a ring group, Hunt group ACD, there is no real time reporting. It’s only historical reporting and you’re not going to be able to get reporting on how long somebody sat in queue, things like that, because there is no sitting listening to hold music, there is no sitting in queue waiting because they’re just hearing ringing and it’s and it’s based on the ring groups that we talked about in the second ago.

Still confused? Reach out and contact me

Well, I hope that clear things up a little bit. Again, if you like my recommendations, if your company has like 50 or more employees and you’d like to know which business phone system vendors your company should be quoting, don’t hesitate. Reach out, Send me an email, give me a call (714.593.0011). I love to help with that. That’s what I do.

I’m a broker for all the major business phone system vendors out there, and I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and there are certain vendors who have certain niches. So based on your company’s requirements, I can quickly tell you which handful of vendors your company should be quoting and why. I’ll also introduce you to the best salespeople to work with that.

Those vendors, and I’ll oversee the quoting process to make sure you get the best pricing. And the nice thing is all that sounds great, right? But how much does it cost? How much do I charge you? I don’t charge you a dime. The service providers pay me my broker fee, so there’s absolutely no reason, no excuse not to at least reach out and see what opinion I might have.

Browse Phone Systems on our website

You can take it or leave it, but no reason to at least not give it a try. Right? Also don’t forget to go to our website Aerocominc.com. You can look at all the major phone system vendors and filter them by available feature like ring Groupon group Call center like we just talked about today. You can also read reviews from other i.t professionals on those vendors and you can also read all types of information on them. So go check that out. I guarantee you’ve never seen a website like that. It’s super cool. We spent a lot of money on it. Go check it out. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and ring the bell and hit the like button. It helps our videos get out there to more people and I really appreciate it.

All right. Well, thanks for watching and have a great day.