About Response Group Service (24-May-09)

Response Group Service

Response Group Service provides a wonderful way to create and configure one or more small response groups for the purpose of routing and queuing incoming phone calls to one or more designated agents. These response groups can be very useful for departments or workgroup environments.

Response group service can be quite useful for all sort of organizations based on VOIP. It allows you to administer all incoming calls in much more optimized way. 

Organizations having internal helpdesk, a customer service desk, or a general external call handler will be most benefited by implementing this service. Response Group Service can increase response group usage and reduce the associated overhead by pushing the tasks of response group maintenance down to the users who directly benefit from them.

Features of Response Group Service

Multiple Call Routing Algorithms

It provides serial, longest-idle, parallel, and round robin routing algorithms. Routing algorithms are configured for each defined group of agents.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

IVR, supported by speech and DTMF key input. IVR prompts can be updated, RGS IVR supports text-to-speech and the .wav file format.

Call queuing

Music on Hold

Presence based routing

Response group templates

The administrator uses the response group template to define the usage experience of the call, including questions asked to the caller, options given to the caller, music-on-hold options, and configuration of business hours and holidays.

User management

User friendly options to configure and manage the response group.

 Agent types

Response Group Service supports two types of user agents – Formal and informal user agents. Formal agents are required to sign in or out of response groups. Informal agents are not required to sign in or out of response groups.

Simplified management

Response Group Service simplifies management of response groups by providing:

• A Web-based response group deployment and configuration tool.
• A stand-alone Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0 snap-in, which can be opened from Office Communications Server 2007 R2.
• Support for end users who are configuring and managing response groups.