A Hunt Group allows you to route an incoming call to multiple extensions. You can choose which extensions to ring, and also in which order. Finally, when a call comes in to a Hunt Group, the name of the group is displayed on the Horizon phone screen, so you are able to tell, for example, if the caller has dialled your “sales” number or “support”, or maybe has dialled a number only published in a particular advertisment.

Hunt groups are free, so if you don’t have enough “subscriptions” for Hunt Groups on your Horizon account, please contact us to have more added at once!

To create a Hunt Group, log in to the Horizon portal as your Admin user, not an individual user account. Go to the Call Groups menu and select Hunt Groups. Click +ADD.

Note that you can change any of these deails later, so we suggest you experiment with each setting to see how it behaves!

First, you must select the site your group applies to (even if you have only one site, you must select it.) Give your hunt group a name, like “Sales Line” or “Main Number”. You also need to give it a “user name”, which we suggest is the same as the hunt group name but without spaces, e.g. “salesline@mycompany.com”. Finally, you need to give it a Caller ID. This is what displays on the phones when  a call comes in, so we suggest the same again – First name “Main” or “Sales”, second name “Number” or “Line”… Save your changes.

In the second page, you need to choose the group type, and decide what happens to calls that are not answered by anyone in the group.

Group Types:

• Circular. Sends the call to the first user in the list. After a few rings, it will try the second. After a call has been answered, the NEXT call to come in will go the next person in the list. After the last person in the list has received a call, the following one starts again at the top of the list.
• Regular. As with Circular, this method works down the list of extensions in order, but each new call always starts at the top of the list.
• Simultaneous. ALL the extensions in the group ring at once. Whoever picks up first handles the call.
• Uniform. Extensions are sorted in order of least recently used, the extension that has been the longest since it was on a call will be the first to be tried.
• Weighted. Calls are assigned at random but you can define a percentage for each extension, e.g. half the calls will go to Extn 300, 20% to 306, etc.

The most popular group types are Regular and Simultaneous.

In the next panel, decide how long it rings each phone before moving on, for each type except Simultaneous. Then decode what to do with the call if no-one answers it in a given time. You can forward the call to any other number, this can be a fixed extension, or another hunt group. Leave this blank if you want to set up a VoiceMail for the group.

IN the next page, choose the users who are part of this group. Tick the boxes on the left against each person you want in the group and click Add Selected. Once you have more than one extension listed on the right side of the screen, you can click and hold on each name and drag it around to arrange the list in the order you want.

In the next screen, you assign a number to the group. You can also assign an extension number. The number must come from your pool of available phone numbers (contact us if you need more numbers!)  This is the number which you want routed to this group. For example, if you are setting up a group to handle “Sales Line”, the number you choose here is your published “sales” number.

Giving the group an extension number means you can transfer calls to it internally.

Save! That’s it, it’s all up and working. Try a call to the assigned number. You should hear it ring the extension(s) in your list, in the order you chose or all at once, and phones with screens will show the name of the group as well as details about the caller.