Delay on calling cell phone when included in a Hunt Group.

[DanielA]

I have a customer that wants the cellphones called when the ring group is called, however, they want to be able to delay that by 10 seconds.

I can see that under the "When calling the extension directly" there is an option to include the cell phone immediately, or after a delay period.

Under "When calling the extension in a hunt group" (or agent group), there is only the options of "Dont call cell phone", "Include cell phone", or "Only if the extension is not registered"

Is there a way to achieve a delay to the inclusion of cell phones when being called as part of the Hunt Group?

[Support]

You can simply add their cell phone to the next stage on the HG which rings after 10 secs of ringing of the first stage?

And maybe keep the extensions (in the cellphone stage)as before?

[DanielA]

This does work. And for small systems, this would be fine.
However, sometimes there are quite a number of mobile users in the hunt groups and it would be better if they could be managed via the main extension.

It would be great if this was configurable on a per hunt group basis.

i.e, have a field on the hunt group like "Delay calling cell phones for X seconds" 

[Vodia PBX]

Doing the delay in the hunt group makes things quite complicated, e.g. because agents can be in multiple stages. IMHO for heavy usage, it makes more sense to give them the app and use the mobile phone "natively" instead of using GSM.

[DanielA]

Issue I've found when adding the cell phone number directly to one of the hunt group stages - it does not have validation that a person has answered (i.e press 1 to accept). So if one user is out of mobile coverage or on a call, their cell phone voicemail will answer the call. So not really suitable.

Could a delay when being called as part of a hunt group be added as a feature of the extension?
Same as the delay for calling the mobile when calling the extension directly?

That would most likely provide a suitable solution for most clients that want this functionality.

The issue we have is mobile network coverage for users that are out of the office and moving around - the app isn't as reliable as GSM for calls.

[Vodia PBX]

The hunt group is a lot more complex than directly calling an extension. E.g. when moving from one stage to another, the cell phone timeout from the previous stage could be still pending. Regardless of the delayed cell phone call issue, because of the nature of the hunt group, multiple users are getting the cell phone call and compete for the "1" press — with the result that some of then will not get it. This is not the kind user experience that I would expect in the year 2021. Apart from the problems with the presentation of the caller-ID.

We had this feature for 10 years when back then PBX apps were clearly bleeding edge of technology and using GSM was a good answer to QoS problems. IMHO today most of the users could as well just use the app and get the call directly, with Caller-ID and everything, no transcoding, on their device instead of routing it trough the PSTN.