Enhanced Call Queues
When will Serial Routing call queues be enhanced? Currently the routing is based on the alphabetical structure of the distribution list which does not work for my call groups. We need the ability to define the routing by agent.

11 comments
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Joe Hendricks commented
Not sure if there is a perm fix for this, however, I noticed a change in our tenant where you can set multiple Call Groups(Distro groups) in a call queue. The work around I have been using is if the call queue has 5 users, I make 5 distro groups and order the distro groups in the call queue. It's not ideal but it's a band-aid until Microsoft enables this feature that has been around since the beginning of time.
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Amanda commented
This should be a no brainer. Serial routing is useless without the ability to order the list of people in a group.
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Anonymous commented
MS saysfor Serial Routing: "want skip agents who are offline, have set their presence to Do not Disturb, or have opted out of getting calls from this queue."
That is completely inadequate! Callers coming through a call queue (central phone number) are offered to agents who can not answer the phone at all, as they e.g. are in break or in a meeting. Only after the defined expiry time (at least 15 seconds, about 3x ringing), the caller is offered to the next agent, which may not be available too. This creates very long and annoying waiting times for the caller. Currently, the only way to quickly accept a caller is to put routing on "attendant", where all the agents ring at the same time. An absolute horror for employees! When a call comes in, it rings immediately ANYWHERE! -
Anonymous commented
One of the big issues we have with further adoption of Teams is the poor support for auto attendant, group numbers and call routing. I have had to set up an an instance of Asterisk to front group numbers for routing, and it seems others are taking up similar services from their Telco providers to overcome these issues. These are features that other platforms have had forever and it shouldn't be necessary to insert an intermediate system to overcome such basic inadequacies.
As a footnote, any enhanced functionality needs to be manageable with a GUI as this is something we'd delegate to non-technical admin staff who wouldn't be proficient with powershell.
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Tyrel Alastair Hunter commented
This is needed for sure, but so are better auto attendant(s).
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Steven Jack commented
I agree with the comments made here, we also make use of visual indication of a hunt group call where users in the group are not in the same location
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Dave Franklin commented
We are in the market for a new phone system and a vital part of that system will be the use of Hunt Groups, Group Pickup, Extension Pickup and so forth which are functions our current Siemens ISDX(L) has. Any lack of these "basic" functions would be a show stopper for our considerations and for most institutions looking to replace a system with Teams. This does have the opportunity for Microsoft to get a good foothold in the telephony market within HE and other institutions if it is delivered as a fully working replacement phone system.
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Peter Hurst commented
We are investigating teams for our university, however hunt groups are key to an enterprise scale deployment to our 3000 staff (about 10-20% would be part of hunt groups. At present the lack of a one stop shop for telephony would prevent use looking at Teams telephony. If MS are serious about this they either need to encompass the core telephony functions or improve integration with third party suppliers like cisco and mitel.
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Peter Kent (Jisc, UK) commented
I'm leading a Teams for telephony pilot in the UK, and provide weekly updates to 51 universities and research organisations around the world. If it wasn't for the lack of call queue group functionality we'd likely have implemented - if the features can't be provided, can APIs to allow third party integrations to work?
The key requirements here are to have hunt groups which are capable of:
- Ringing all members of a group at once (which Teams can do).
- Ringing members of a group in a range of serial models:
--- Ring members in a strict pre-determined order (taking in account anyone who’s opted out of the group).
--- Ring members in a random order.
--- Ring members in an most-idle order - whereby the first person to get the call is that person who has been longest off the phone or hasn’t picked up a call for the longest period.- Escalating calls through groups. For example, a call comes to one group and doesn’t get answered so moves to another group. Where we’ve used this is a our service desk where engineers phones ring all at once, if no one picks up it’ll ring a broader group (the original group plus senior engineers).
- Allowing members of the group to easily opt out of receiving calls to the group - when they’re on lunch, not on duty, etc.
Thanks! -
Tyrel Alastair Hunter commented
This issue also needs to include support for Round Robin call pattern, and weighted distribution. This would allow us to put a weight on our best sales rep giving them a x number of seconds advantage on picking up the calls.
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Jason Tenpenny commented
This would be a wonderful feature for us as well. I've been testing things out to see if we can feasibly transition to S4B/Teams phones, and this is a hangup. Our current phone system allows us to specify an order of agents to dial, and that's very important for the way our organization works.