Short answer
A ring group is a named set of agents who ring when a call comes in, plus how they ring (all at once, in order, round robin, longest idle, fewest calls or best skill) and what happens if nobody answers. It's inbound only because it answers "whose phone should ring?", and on an outbound call nobody needs to ring: your agent places the call. Outbound uses the lead queue with teams, skills and owners.
"Ring group" comes from phone systems. It goes by other names too: hunt group, call group, ACD group. The idea is always the same. A call comes in, and you need to decide which people's phones ring, in what order, and what happens if nobody picks up.
What a ring group contains
| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Members | Agents you list, plus everyone on a team you pick |
| Required skills | Members must have all of these to be rung |
| Strategy | Simultaneous, sequential, round robin, longest idle, fewest calls or skills |
| Ring time | How long each attempt rings, 5–120 seconds (20 by default) |
| Overflow | Voicemail, the waiting queue, another ring group, a forward number or hang up |
Only free agents are rung. Someone already talking, or dialing in a power session, isn't interrupted.
Where ring groups are used
All of these are calls coming in:
- A phone number's inbound action: "ring this group".
- An IVR step: "press 1 for sales" rings the Sales group.
- A campaign's inbound route: when a lead calls back the number they were dialed from. See what happens when a lead calls back.
- Call tracking routes.
Why not outbound?
On an outbound call, the agent starts the call, so there's nothing to "ring". The outbound question is different: which lead should this agent dial next? That's answered by the campaign queue:
| Question | Inbound | Outbound |
|---|---|---|
| Who handles this person? | Ring group members, in strategy order | Agents allowed by teams, skills, licensed state and owner |
| In what order? | Ring strategy | Queue order (priority, minimums, cadence…) |
| Nobody available? | Overflow chain | The lead waits in the queue |
So outbound has its own version of everything a ring group does. It just works on leads instead of calls. See how leads are distributed.
The outbound moments that do look inbound
Two outbound situations involve a live person who needs a free agent:
- A lead answers while their agent is already talking (power or predictive dialing). Answered-call overflow hands them to a free teammate. See answered-call overflow.
- An agent wants to hand the call to someone else. That's a transfer, to a teammate or an outside number. See warm and blind transfers.
Is this how other dialers do it?
Yes. Phone systems like RingCentral and Dialpad use ring groups or call queues for inbound, and plain dialing for outbound. Contact-center platforms like VICIdial, Five9 and Convoso split inbound queues (VICIdial calls them in-groups) from outbound campaigns. See how other dialers handle groups.