Ring Groups are quite often misunderstood, or the benefits are not immediately realised.Some businesses confuse Ring Groups with IVR (Auto-Attendant). This is normal as quite often ring groups are mostly used with IVR based systems.

With many businesses, especially with legacy PBX systems, the most common method is that one call comes in, and one person answers the call. Quite often this person can become swamped with phone calls at certain periods of the day. This can sometimes result in calls being not answered, or at least not answered in an acceptable time period. Alternatively, you may have an ad hoc system, where if other staff are aware that more calls are coming in than the receptionist person can handle, they might try and answer calls, but invariably, they end up picking up the wrong line where someone is on hold. How many times have you rung a business, been placed on hold for someone, and have some else pick up the line believing they are answering the phone?

Ring Groups do not have to be used with IVR capabilities. Some businesses absolutely must have the IVR system in place, others absolutely loath it and so do their clients. This very much has to do with the type of business and the client type that they look after.

For this reason, Ring Groups can be used on their own, and probably half the PBX systems we install, the client chooses cascading Ring Groups. This means that they use multiple Ring Groups chained together.

As an example, the first Ring Group may just have one or two phone extensions in it, quite often the receptionist and possibly a person acting as a backup receptionist. If they don't answer the phone within a predetermined time such as 6 seconds, it then proceeds to the next Ring Group, which may contain the original two receptionist numbers, but the second Ring Group also contains a few more phone extensions. This mean the people at the additional extensions know that the call has not been picked up by the receptionist(s), and the client has been waiting 6 seconds already, so it is important to pickup and answer the phone. If the second Ring Group does not answer with another 6 seconds, the next Ring Group may contain all phone extensions within the business. This way everyone in the business knows the client is just about to give up and the phone needs to answered immediately.

We talk about receptionists in the example above, however it does not have to mean a designated receptionist as many businesses do not have such a person, but it could be three or four people elected or suited to taking incoming calls (e.g. the sales department),


Like many of the features of the OfficeIPLink™ PBX system, they can be mixed and matched and cascaded to form some extremely complex actions never thought possible on a PBX system previously. In general, what ever you can imagine in your mind, there is normally a way of producing it with the OfficeIPLink™ PBX.