Ring Groups: Never Miss Important Calls Again

Increase your response times and avoid missed calls. OpenPhone ring groups let you customize who receives inbound calls and when they get them.

Plans start at $15 per user per month.

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What are ring groups?

A ring group is a call routing feature that sends incoming calls to specific groups of people on a shared number. It’s an effective way to sequence inbound calls to a shared number without notifying everyone in the team simultaneously.

Ring groups are useful when several team members in a department sharing a number, say in sales or customer service. Front-line reps can get incoming calls first, and if they're unable to answer, the rest of the team can receive them.

Benefits of ring groups

A cell phone with a pink background and a conversation with a woman named Cathy.

Drive faster response times

Route calls to another teammate if everyone in the first group is already on a call.

Reduce missed calls

Create additional groups that can serve as a backup if other members of the team are unavailable. Plus, forward calls to an external number if no one on your team can pick up.

Increase operational efficiency

Leverage customizable call management to split the load of incoming calls.

Three different ways to ring your team

Choose from three ring group options to fit every department’s calling needs.

Simultaneous ring groups

Ring everyone on your team all at once. Perfect for small teams & sales teams.

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Random ring groups

Ring your team in round-robin-style batches. Perfect for small teams & customer support teams.

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Custom ring groups

Customize which members of your team get incoming calls first. Perfect for small teams & customer support teams.

Note: Custom ring groups are available on Business plans and higher

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Start using ring groups in four simple steps

It only takes four steps to get started with OpenPhone's ring groups:

Start with a free trial of OpenPhone
Launch the OpenPhone web, desktop, or mobile app.
Import contacts and add teammates to your account.
Customize your ring groups as you like.

A conversation between two people on a messaging app.

Why thousands of teams choose OpenPhone

Here are a few other key reasons growing businesses around the world use OpenPhone.

Get as many numbers as your team needs

Give every department their own number or automatically route calls from a main office line. Each user comes with one free number. Choose from local numbers (US or Canadian) with specific area codes and toll-free numbers for a nationwide presence. Easily scale your business phone system as you add more people to the team — additional phone numbers cost just $5 per month.

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Make every call a delightful experience

Leave a great impression on your customers more easily with OpenPhone.

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Direct customers to the right member of your team with custom phone menus (also known as IVR and auto attendant). If you need to connect them to another colleague manually, you can always use warm transfers. And you can loop in multiple stakeholders on a call by hosting group calls.

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Create a collaborative environment for your team

OpenPhone helps you work better with your team. Your team can easily see the full conversation history with a contact in a single view, including all calls, texts, and voice messages. Plus, easily work with colleagues by tagging them in threads only visible to your team.

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Managers can quickly review any customer interaction and coach employees as needed. Every recorded call can include an AI-powered call summary and transcription so you can tag teammates and refer them to specific time-stamped sections. If you’ve been running into issues with missed calls, you can quickly drill down and see who still needs to be followed up with using call views.

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Take work off your team’s plate

OpenPhone puts repetitive work on autopilot. With advanced messaging features like SMS auto-replies, scheduled messages, and automated text flows, you can deliver the right messages to customers at the right time.

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Use CRM and VoIP integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zapier, to track calls. And with business hours, after hours call forwarding, and custom voicemail greetings, you can maintain a better work-life balance.

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“After evaluating 6 or 7 other vendors, we found that only OpenPhone checked all the boxes. It's just worlds better. We love using the round robin option, which rings other staff members if someone's unavailable, so that client calls are serviced in a timely fashion.”

Brian Thomas

Director of Claims Experience
at Coterie Insurance

Frequently asked questions

Can’t find the answer here? Check out our Help Center.

How do ring groups work?

Ring groups dial specific team members according to a pre-existing set of conditions. These conditions can be programmed based on the type of ring group you set up in your business phone system.

What are the different types of ring groups?

Different phones offer different types of ring groups to their users. In OpenPhone, the three different ring groups you can choose from are:
- All at once: All the users in a shared number are dialed at the same time.
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- Random: A randomized group of users are dialed in batches. You can customize how many users are dialed for how long, but you can’t specify exactly which users.

For example, you can create a random ring group of 2 users dialed for 10 seconds, followed by another 2 random users dialed for 15 seconds.

If no one in the last group takes the call, it goes to voice message.

- Custom: In this option, you can:
     - Specify which members with shared access to your OpenPhone are part of a specific groups
     - Sort the ring order for each group if you want specific teammates to take calls firsts
     - Set the ring duration for each group that receives calls

What’s the difference between ring groups and call queues?

Ring groups involve calls that are dialed to custom batches of users. Call queues involve customers waiting in line for team members to take their calls.

Call queues are inefficient for small teams because they force customers to wait for specific team members, like customer support, to take their calls. Ring groups are more efficient because they direct customer calls to backup group members who can answer their questions without having to wait on hold.