Ring Groups

Ring groups let you route incoming calls to multiple destinations simultaneously. When a call reaches a ring group, all members ring at the same time until someone answers or the timeout expires.

Viewing Ring Groups

Navigate to Ring Groups from the sidebar. The table shows all ring groups for the selected account, including their name, extension number, and member count.

Creating a Ring Group

1. Click Add Ring Group in the top-right corner.
2. Enter a Name for the ring group (e.g., "Sales Team" or "Support").
3. Click Create.

Ring Group Details

Click on any ring group row to open its detail page. The detail page has two sections:

Settings

• Timeout — How long (in seconds) all members ring before the call is considered unanswered. Must be between 5 and 300 seconds.
• Ignore Device Call Forwarding — When enabled, a member's phone that redirects the call is treated as busy, and the group keeps ringing its other members. This applies to call forwarding configured on the phone itself, which the phone performs rather than the platform. It does not disable a member's Find Me / Follow Me or change which targets that produces, though it does still apply to any phone those targets reach. See How a Member's Own Call Forwarding and Routing Apply.
• Confirm Pick-Up (External) — When enabled, external destinations must press "1" before being connected to the caller. This prevents calls from being answered by an external voicemail system instead of a real person. It applies to phone number members and a member's Find Me / Follow Me external targets. The prompt plays as soon as the external destination answers, repeats every few seconds, and the person has 15 seconds to press "1"; otherwise that leg is dropped. Those 15 seconds are counted from the moment the external destination answers, so a destination that answers near the end of the ring window can hold the group open past the configured Timeout — the Timeout Behavior then fires once the unconfirmed leg is dropped. While the external member hears the confirmation prompt, the ring group keeps ringing all other members; whoever answers first (an internal member picking up, or the external member pressing 1) wins, and the remaining members are dropped.
• Timeout Behavior — What happens when no member answers within the timeout. Options are: None (the call hangs up), Ring user (ring a specific user), Voicemail (send to a user's voicemail or a shared voicemail box), or Overflow to queue (place the caller into a call queue).
• Timeout Target — The user, shared voicemail box, or queue to route the caller to when no member answers. This field appears when Timeout Behavior is set to anything other than None.

Members

Members are the destinations that ring when the group receives a call. A member can be either an extension (a user, dial plan, voice app, or another ring group) or an external phone number.

When the group rings an external member, a call that came in on one of your numbers shows the original caller's number; a call that started inside the account shows one of yours instead. In the first case, this is part of why Confirm Pick-Up (External) is useful: the person answering cannot tell from the caller ID alone that this is a business call.

Adding a Member

1. Click Add Member.
2. Choose the member type:
   • User — Search for and select users from your account. You can pick several at once: each one appears as a chip below the search box, and clicking a chip's × removes it from the selection. Users already in the ring group are hidden.
   • Phone Number — Enter an external phone number. The number is validated and formatted as you type. Phone numbers are added one at a time.
3. Click Add.

If some of the selected users can't be added, the ones that succeeded are added and the dialog stays open with only the failed users still selected, each with the reason it failed. Fix the problem or remove them, then click Add again.

Removing a Member

Hover over a member row and click the trash icon to remove it from the ring group.

How a Member's Own Call Forwarding and Routing Apply

Two different things get called "a member's call forwarding," and a ring group treats them differently:

• Forwarding set on the member's phone is performed by the phone, not the platform. That is what the Ignore Device Call Forwarding setting above controls.
• Routing set in the admin portal is Find Me / Follow Me, described below. Ignore Device Call Forwarding does not disable it or change which targets it produces.

The two meet in one place: Ignore Device Call Forwarding applies to every leg the group dials, so it also covers a phone reached through a member's Find Me / Follow Me.

When a member is a user, what actually rings depends on that user's Find Me / Follow Me configuration.

• No Find Me / Follow Me configured — the group rings all of that user's devices, including their softphone.
• Find Me / Follow Me configured — the group rings the targets in step 1 only, and those targets replace the user's devices rather than ringing alongside them. If step 1 lists an external number, that number rings as part of the group.

Later steps and the Find Me / Follow Me If no answer fallback never run inside a ring group. Once the ring window closes, the group's own Timeout Behavior decides what happens next.

This is worth checking when a member's routing looks like it was skipped, or when someone reports that a member's call forwarding was ignored. Take the common setup where step 1 rings the user's devices and step 2 rings their cell phone: dialing that user directly ladders through to the cell, but calling the ring group rings only the devices. To have a member's cell ring as part of the group, either move the number into step 1 or add it to the group as a phone number member.

Silent Ringing for Ring Group Calls

Desk phones can ring silently for calls that come through a ring group while still ringing normally for every other call. A silent call still appears on the phone's screen, flashes its light and shows up in its missed calls, so a member can see and answer it without the whole office hearing every group call.

This is a phone setting, not a ring group setting: it can be turned on for all phones in the account or for individual phones, and it applies to every ring group those phones belong to. It is supported on Snom and Yealink desk phones. To turn it on for one phone, open the device and set Ring Group Calls to Ring silently under Advanced (see Devices). To turn it on for every phone in the account, contact DialStack. Phones pick up the change the next time they fetch their configuration.

Things to know:

• A direct call can wait behind a silent one. If a direct call arrives while a silent ring group call is ringing on the same phone, the direct call shows on screen but stays silent until the ring group call stops ringing.
• Yealink contact ringtones win. If a member saved the caller in their Yealink phone's directory with a custom ringtone, that ringtone plays.
• Softphones and external numbers ring as usual. Only desk phones ring silently.

Renaming a Ring Group

Click the ring group name at the top of the detail page to edit it inline. Press Enter or click away to save.

Deleting a Ring Group

Ring groups can be deleted from the account detail page under the Ring Groups section.