Hosted PBX Guide

Call Groups, Hunt Groups, ACD Queues - Whats the difference and should you care?

The short answer is YES, especially if you have multiple people in your company handling calls based on common customer needs, such as sales or support.

 Here is the overall summary of the service providers I looked at:

Over the weekend I had some confusion expressed to me by someone who visited the page, and I figured I should address the question for everyone. I’ve mentioned queues and hunt groups in a few articles, and have a brief splash on the glossary page, and talk about the ‘quality’ of the different ‘queuing services’ provided by the different companies I’ve discussed here, but there’s evidently a need for clarification. So here goes.

First, all the different words used so far refer to a similar telephony concept – grouping callers that have the same need together, and getting them to a skilled person within a group of people who can answer that need. A good example of this is when you call into a large company and want to talk to their billing department. You don’t know who you want to talk to, just someone who can tell you about your bill. And the company gets enough calls of this type that it has a dozen people who can take that call, half of whom are already on a call. So the technology involved is all designed to get a caller to an answerer.

Now the difference between the terms. The industry recognizes two basic terms for the technology used in making call groups, so any system has either a ‘hunt group’ or an ‘ACD queue’. ACD refers to ‘Automatic Call Distribution’, the technology used to automatically distribute calls to whoever can answer them. A hunt group is essentially the low-tech version of this system. Hopefully you’re with me so far. It should be a little more clear from here on out.

So, point is, there’s a few different companies that provided hosted PBX service, and lots of businesses need to be able to accept calls to a group of employees. As a result, all of them provide some variant of this service. I’ll start simple, and proceed up from there.

Basic Hosted PBX companies use the simple hunt group technology. The owner of the account creates a group and assigns it a digit (such as ‘press three for billing’). They then assign a series of phone numbers to this group. When a caller tries to reach that group, the system checks a number to see whether or not it is busy before moving on to the next. This can either be done by random assignment through the numbers or by going down a list and restarting at the top. As you can see, a basichunt group does the job – callers get connected to one of up to sixteen (depending on service provider) agents who can take their call.But it is not optimal, and can lead to unnecessarily long wait times for your callers.

Advanced calling services provide full ACD Queue technology. There are a few major differences between an ACD and a hunt group, primarily in the fields of management and efficiency. Among others, a full-feature queue can have an unlimited number of agents logged into the system; the system is constantly aware of which lines are already busy; it does not take time checking extensions that will be giving a busy answer (this results in less time spent on hold); and managing an ACD queue is generally easier, as agents can be entered or removed from cues at any time. More advanced systems allow for agents to manage their own presence in the queues and real time monitors of the Queues by system administrators.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how some of the competitors handle their call groups. This will be updated every so often as services change or I learn more.

Onebox: Onebox can create a group of up to ten numbers which will be rung to in order or randomly. If you assign the desk numbers of your agents, you can create a hunt group of size ten or less. It’s not the most efficient, but at least gets callers connected after a while. My score is a 2 out of 10

GotVMail: Same trick, a list of phone numbers to be called, size sixteen. Again, while it does the job, if you want to have a particular agent unavailable you have to go into the extension and remove that phone number, then add it when they get back. They do have additional reporting options, however. My score is a 3 out of 10

Ringcentral: Ringcentral has something between a hunt group and an ACD queue. You get to assign which extensions are in the queue, and have more options about the order in which calls are rung. However, the ability to monitor and manage queues is still difficult, the calls are not processed at maximum efficiency, My score is a 6 out of 10

VirtualPBX.com: Unlike the other companies, Virtual PBX did not create a simple hunt group and start adding features. They started with an ACD Queue and improved from there. So you get a system that can be customized easily at any time, routes calls quickly, manages presence, and keeps detailed call logs. My score is a 9 out of 10

In other words, reading from top to bottom, you get increased connection speed, features, and flexibility. Hopefully that clears up the question for the future. For additional information on any of these companies or their service, write me, ask in the forums, or contact the company directly.

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