Running a business of any type is not an easy task, especially when you are competing against thousands of businesses in the same market. It is even harder when you run a business with multiple locations or if the nature of your job requires that you often work outside of your office.
One of the useful features that VoIP provides to help you build a strong relationship with your clients and grow your business is Call Hunting (also called: hunt groups, call handling, and find me follow me). Read on to learn more about this helpful feature.
What is call hunting?
Call hunting is a feature that connects an incoming call to different telephone numbers, one after the another, until it is answered by an available agent or transferred to a voicemail.
This feature can be configured in many ways:
You can setup the Hunt Group to first ring the office number or an extension for a certain period of time. If no one answered, the call will be automatically forwarded to the next contact number or extension listed until it is answered or reached the voicemail. For example, you can setup the group hunt list to call your office number first, then your personal mobile, then your home landline and so on.
The Hunt Group can also be setup to first reach an extension with a recorded greeting message. In this case, the system will play the message and move on automatically to the next extension on the list.
In more advanced configurations, you can setup different behaviours for the Hunt Group depending on the time of day you receive the call. For example, if you receive a call to your office number within the hours of work it will sequentially ring a certain list of extensions until it is answered. If you received it after 7:00 pm it’ll be automatically forwarded to your voicemail or a special voice message.
You can also choose to broadcast an incoming call to a list of extensions simultaneously or bypass busy lines and broadcast the call to the next available agents until it is answered by one of them.
What makes call hunting so beneficial?
The call hunting feature offers many benefits for businesses and facilitates daily communications with clients. It offers you the option to setup different hunt groups for special times and events.
For example, forward all incoming calls outside the working hours or during an event or a holiday to a certain greeting message and a voicemail. It allows you to maximise your availability by helping your clients to reach you even if you are working outside of your office or even outside of the country!
It allows you to maintain your privacy; you only give your clients the office number and then it’s up to you whether you want to transfer incoming calls to your mobile number, your house landline, or a voicemail. All these benefits, and more, will help to increase the clients’ satisfaction from your services and grow your business.
Find out more
Want to learn how to setup a hunt group on your VoIP system? Read our article “How to setup call hunting on the VIP VoIP system”