Group Call Pickup in Teams Phone

If you’re coming from a CISCO, Avaya, Panasonic or other legacy PABX across to Teams Phone, there’s a good chance someone within your org will ask you to configure Group Call Pickup at some point.

What Is Group Call Pickup?

In PBX (Private Branch eXchange) terms, Group Call Pickup gives your users the ability to answer a call that’s ringing on another phone nearby. This is typically done by either hitting the GrpPckUp button, or keying in a code starting with * followed by a bunch of numbers. Once you’ve hit the button, or punched in the right code into your phone, you’ll then answer that inbound call on your phone, saving you the 5 or so steps from your desk to your colleagues. You can typically tell who’s been around the longest in a team by how many different * codes they call recall.

Is Group Call Pickup still a thing these days?

Sort of. Although now that most teams are working in some sort of hybrid scenario – where some may be in the office, and others may be working from home. This creates an issue for Group Call Pickup.

Of course, those in the office can hear the ringing phone, and so they know there’s a call coming in and can answer it. Those working from home though? Not so much.

How Group Call Pickup works in Teams

To solve this, GCP works a little differently in Teams. Instead of your team having to remember * codes or be within hearing distance of that ringing phone, you can configure call groups inside of Teams instead to automatically route your inbound calls through to the rest of your Team. You can do this immediately for all inbound calls, or after a number of seconds to give you time to answer it first.

First you add members to your Call Group, and configure the order in which they’d receive the call.

Once you’ve added your group members, you can then configure when they’ll receive the call. Either straight away, or when you can’t answer a call

When do inbound calls also ring members of my call group?

Direct line calls (someone who’s called you directly) will be sent to your call group. Calls coming from Call Queues will not be redirected.