Response Groups

Response Groups are a feature first introduced in Office Communications Server 2007 R2 that were enhanced in Lync Server 2010 and remain largely unchanged in Lync Server 2013. A Response Group is a method to route calls to a specific queue or set of agents. Some consider Response Groups to be on a similar level as hunt groups from traditional telephony, but an administrator typically has much greater control over a Response Group than a PBX hunt group. Many PBXs call this feature Automatic Call Distribution (ACD).

Response Groups in Lync are composed of the following components:

• Agent Groups—Agent groups contain a specified set of user accounts that belong to a Response Group. How calls are routed in the group and what options a member has are configured at the agent group level.

• Queues—A queue is an object that holds callers as they dial in to the Response Group. A queue can contain multiple agent groups, or sometimes just a single agent group is included. Settings such as timeouts and call capacity are configured at the queue level.

• Workflows—Workflows are the glue that ties together the agent groups and the queues. The workflow settings determine how a caller reaches a specific queue depending on question responses, time of day, or holidays.

The following sections explain each of these components in more detail and discuss how to configure a complete Response Group.