Sometimes we need to forward a call to a specific team of people or division rather than a specific individual.
For example, if an employee wants to phone their HR department, they can dial a HR number which will then forward the call to ring an entire group of people.
Cisco Call Manager has a utility called a Hunt Group that helps administrate such a feature.
As per the usual Cisco 3 layer hierarchy, this is split up into 3 main parts:
You will notice that the term “Hunt Group” itself is not mentioned, this is because it is almost a quick term for the feature rather than an official one.
Let’s walk through each of these sections, starting from the bottom:
Line Group
The Line Group is where we put the users we want in the Hunt Group in. We add them one by one by searching for their extension.
Here we also have some options on how the call behaves. We can set how long (in seconds) before a call moves on to the next person (or next Line Group, depending on your configuration).
We can also set the Distribution Algorithm. For this we have 4 options:
Top Down
Circular
Longest Idle Time
Broadcast
Hunt List
We then attach the previously mentioned Line Group to a Hunt List.
It is at this stage we can add multiple Line Groups (if configured) to our Hunt List.
Make sure the ‘Enable this Hunt List’ checkbox is ticked!
Hunt Pilot
The Hunt Pilot is the number which is called to send the call to the configured users. We add the Hunt list we configured to be used by this Hunt Pilot.
It must be a Directory Number not already in use.
On the Hunt Pilot configuration page we can also configure settings such as what to do with the call if no users pick up, or if they are busy.
Done!
Here are some examples of a logical overview of what your ‘Hunt Groups’ would look like and some of the options you can use: