Webex Calling Hunt Groups, Auto Attendants, and Call Queues

Why This Guide Exists

Auto attendants and call queues are where most Webex Calling deployments either earn trust or lose it with end users. A well-configured auto attendant routes callers efficiently and reflects well on the organization. A poorly configured one frustrates callers, generates helpdesk tickets, and gets blamed on the phone system when the real problem is the design.

This guide covers the production configuration of hunt groups, auto attendants, and call queues in Webex Calling — not the Control Hub button locations, but the decisions that determine whether the configuration actually works in a real environment. If you want a surface-level walkthrough, Cisco’s documentation covers that. If you want to know what to configure, why, and what breaks when you get it wrong, this is the guide.

Before working through this article, your locations, users, and PSTN connectivity should already be in place. If you’re still working through initial Control Hub setup, start with Control Hub Deep Dive — Configuring Users, Locations, and Calling Features and Webex Calling Cloud Deployment — Full Setup Walkthrough (Part 2).

Hunt Groups — The Right Tool for Simple Scenarios

Hunt groups are the lightest-weight inbound call distribution option in Webex Calling. They ring a defined list of users in a configured pattern until someone answers. No queue, no wait time announcements, no agent state management — just a number that finds an available person.

When to Use a Hunt Group

Hunt groups are the right tool when the requirement is simple: a shared number that rings multiple people and the caller doesn’t need to know they’re waiting. Common use cases include a small team’s direct line, a department that self-manages coverage, or a backup ring path for a number that primarily reaches one person.

When the requirement involves callers waiting on hold, queue position announcements, overflow routing logic, or any visibility into how calls are being handled, use a call queue instead. Hunt groups have no queue — if all members are busy, the call follows the no-answer behavior immediately. There is no holding pattern.

Hunt Group Routing Patterns

Navigate to Calling > Features > Hunt Group > Add Hunt Group to create a new group. The routing pattern is the most consequential configuration decision:

Sequential rings members in a defined order — member 1, then member 2, then member 3. The first available member answers. Use this when there’s a clear priority order for who should handle calls — a primary contact with backups behind them.

Simultaneous rings all members at once. Whoever answers first gets the call. Use this for small teams where speed of answer matters more than distribution. Be aware that simultaneous ringing on large groups creates a poor experience for members — everyone’s phone rings for every call regardless of what they’re doing.

Uniform distributes calls to the member who has been idle the longest since their last call. This produces even distribution over time and is the right default for most small team coverage scenarios.

Weighted distributes calls based on a configured percentage per member. Use this when one member should handle a larger share of calls than others — for example, a senior team member handling 60% of volume with two junior members splitting the remaining 40%.

No-Answer and Unavailable Behavior

Configure what happens when no hunt group member answers. Options are:

Forward to a phone number or extension — sends unanswered calls to a voicemail, another user, or a call queue
Play an announcement and disconnect — informs the caller no one is available and ends the call

Do not leave this unconfigured. A hunt group with no no-answer behavior will ring indefinitely or fail silently depending on carrier behavior. Every hunt group needs an explicit overflow destination.

Auto Attendants — Production Configuration

Architecture Before Configuration

The most common auto attendant mistake is opening Control Hub and starting to configure before the call flow has been designed. Auto attendant configuration in Webex Calling is straightforward once you know what you’re building. It is frustrating and error-prone when you’re figuring out the design as you go.

Before you touch Control Hub, document the following for every auto attendant you’re deploying:

The main number or extension that reaches this auto attendant
Business hours — specific days and time ranges, not “9 to 5”
After-hours behavior — does it play a message and disconnect, transfer to voicemail, or transfer to another number?
Holiday schedule — which holidays apply, and what behavior changes on those days?
Menu options — every key press, what it says in the recording, and exactly where it routes
Overflow — what happens if a destination is unavailable when the auto attendant tries to transfer?

Put this in a document or a flow diagram. Review it with whoever owns the phone system on the customer side before you configure anything. Changes to auto attendant design after configuration are a minor inconvenience. Changes after go-live when users are already calling the number are a bigger problem.

Creating the Auto Attendant

Navigate to Calling > Features > Auto Attendant > Add Auto Attendant.

Basic settings:

Name — use a name that identifies the function, not a generic label. “Main Reception AA” or “Support Line AA” is more useful than “Auto Attendant 1”
Phone number / Extension — assign the DID or extension that callers will reach. A main company number typically points to the primary auto attendant
Time Zone — must match the physical location this auto attendant serves. An auto attendant set to the wrong time zone will apply business hours and after-hours routing incorrectly — calls at 5pm local time will route as if it’s midnight if the time zone is wrong
Language — sets the language for system-generated prompts. If the organization serves callers in multiple languages, separate auto attendants per language is cleaner than trying to handle multilingual routing in a single menu

Business Hours Configuration

Business hours in Webex Calling are configured as a schedule that the auto attendant references. Navigate to Calling > Call Settings > Business Hours to create a schedule, then reference it in the auto attendant configuration.

Define business hours precisely. “Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm” is not the same as “Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm, excluding federal holidays” — the holiday handling is a separate schedule. If the organization has non-standard hours — extended hours on certain days, different hours at different locations — create separate schedules for each pattern and assign the correct one to each auto attendant.

A single business hours schedule can be referenced by multiple auto attendants. If your organization has five auto attendants that all follow the same hours, create one schedule and reference it five times. When hours change, update one schedule instead of five auto attendants.

Holiday Schedules

Holiday schedules are separate configuration objects in Control Hub. Navigate to Calling > Call Settings > Holiday Schedule to create them.

Create your holiday schedule before you configure the auto attendant — the auto attendant configuration requires you to select an existing schedule, and creating it mid-configuration interrupts the workflow.

A few operational notes on holiday schedules:

Holiday schedules in Webex Calling are date-specific, not rule-based. “The fourth Thursday of November” is not a valid entry — you enter the specific date. This means holiday schedules require annual maintenance. The schedule that covers 2025 holidays will not automatically roll to 2026. Set a calendar reminder to update holiday dates before they arrive.

For organizations with multiple locations in different states or countries, create separate holiday schedules per location. Federal holidays are consistent but state and local holidays vary. An auto attendant serving a Texas office and an auto attendant serving a Massachusetts office may need different holiday schedules even if they share the same business hours.

Menu Design — What Makes or Breaks the Caller Experience

The auto attendant menu is where most configuration errors occur and where caller experience is determined. A few principles that hold up consistently in production:

Fewer options, shorter recordings. Research on IVR behavior consistently shows that callers start pressing keys before the recording finishes — often before the second option. Keep menu recordings under 20 seconds. If you need more than 20 seconds to explain the options, there are too many options.

Options ordered by volume, not organizational hierarchy. The most frequently chosen option should be option 1. Callers who want sales should press 1 if sales is the highest volume destination — not press 4 because that’s where sales sits in the org chart. Design for callers, not for the org chart.

Repeat and exit options. Always include an option to repeat the menu (typically 0 or 9) and an option to reach a live person (typically 0). Callers who miss an option or don’t know which option applies to them need a graceful path that doesn’t require hanging up and calling back.

Don’t bury common destinations. If 60% of callers want to reach the front desk, the front desk should be reachable in one key press from the main menu. A caller who has to navigate two levels of menu to reach the most common destination will express that frustration to the person who answers.

Recording the Prompts

Webex Calling supports three methods for auto attendant prompts:

Text-to-speech — Cisco generates the audio from text you enter in Control Hub. Fast to deploy, easy to update, acceptable quality for most use cases. Use this for initial deployment and replace with professional recordings if audio quality becomes a concern.

Upload an audio file — upload a pre-recorded WAV or MP3 file. Use this when the organization has professional recordings or specific branding requirements for their phone system audio. File requirements: WAV format, 8kHz or 16kHz sample rate, mono, 8-bit or 16-bit depth. Files that don’t meet these requirements will be rejected or will play with degraded quality.

Record in the Webex App — users can record prompts directly through the Webex App. Useful for quick updates but produces inconsistent audio quality compared to professional recordings.

For production deployments, the practical recommendation is to use text-to-speech for initial go-live and schedule a professional recording session for the first month post-launch. Launching with clean text-to-speech is better than delaying go-live waiting for recordings.

When recordings do come in, name the files systematically before uploading — “main-menu-business-hours-v1.wav,” “main-menu-after-hours-v1.wav,” and so on. Control Hub doesn’t organize uploaded audio files for you. Unnamed files become impossible to manage when you have twenty of them.

Configuring Menu Key Assignments

In the auto attendant configuration, each key press (0–9, *, #) can be assigned one of the following destinations:

Transfer to operator — routes to the operator extension configured for the location
Transfer to phone number — routes to any internal extension or external number
Transfer to voicemail — routes directly to a user’s or group’s voicemail
Transfer to auto attendant — routes to another auto attendant (used for sub-menus)
Transfer to call queue — routes to a configured call queue
Transfer to hunt group — routes to a configured hunt group
Repeat menu — replays the current menu recording
Play announcement — plays a recorded message without transferring

For multi-level menus, the second level auto attendant is a separate auto attendant object in Control Hub — not a nested configuration within the parent. Create the sub-menu auto attendant first, then reference it as a transfer destination in the parent menu. This approach means each level of the menu is independently configurable and testable.

After-Hours Configuration

The after-hours configuration mirrors the business hours configuration but applies when calls arrive outside of your business hours schedule. Options:

Play announcement and disconnect — plays a message telling the caller the office is closed and disconnects. Include your business hours and any emergency contact in the recording
Transfer to phone number — routes to an answering service, on-call number, or voicemail
Transfer to auto attendant — routes to a simplified after-hours auto attendant with fewer options

After-hours behavior is commonly underconfigured. “Play a message and hang up” is technically correct but leaves callers with no path forward. At minimum, the after-hours recording should tell the caller when the office reopens and provide an email address or emergency contact number for urgent matters.

Holiday Routing

Holiday behavior is configured separately from after-hours behavior. The holiday schedule you created earlier is referenced here. When a call arrives on a date that matches the holiday schedule, Webex Calling applies the holiday routing instead of checking whether the call falls within business hours.

Holiday routing options are the same as after-hours: play and disconnect, transfer to number, or transfer to another auto attendant. For most organizations, holiday routing mirrors after-hours routing. For organizations that have on-call or reduced-hours service on holidays, a dedicated holiday auto attendant with appropriate messaging is worth the configuration time.

Call Queues — Production Configuration

Call Queues vs Hunt Groups — Making the Right Choice

Before configuring a call queue, confirm that a call queue is actually the right tool. The decision criteria:

Use a call queue when:

Callers may need to wait on hold
You need queue position announcements or estimated wait time messaging
You need visibility into queue performance — calls waiting, average wait time, abandon rate
Agent state management (available, unavailable, wrap-up) matters
Overflow logic needs to be configurable based on queue depth or wait time

Use a hunt group when:

Calls should reach someone immediately or follow no-answer behavior
No holding is expected or acceptable
The team is small and coverage is handled informally
Reporting and visibility into call handling aren’t requirements

Most front-desk, support, and sales line scenarios warrant a call queue. Most small team coverage scenarios warrant a hunt group.

Creating a Call Queue

Navigate to Calling > Features > Call Queue > Add Call Queue.

Basic configuration:

Name — descriptive and function-specific. “Support Queue” or “Sales Queue” rather than “Queue 1”
Phone number / Extension — the DID or extension callers reach
Time Zone — same consideration as auto attendants. Must reflect the local time zone of the site this queue serves
Language — sets the language for system-generated queue prompts
First name / Last name — the caller ID name presented when agents make outbound calls from the queue number. Set this to something meaningful — “Support Line” or “Company Name Sales” rather than a generic label

Routing Algorithms

The routing algorithm determines how calls are distributed to available agents. Webex Calling supports four options:

Longest Idle routes the call to the agent who has been available (not on a call) for the longest period. This produces the most even distribution of call volume over time and is the right default for most support and sales queues.

Round Robin distributes calls in a rotating sequence regardless of how long each agent has been idle. Each agent receives approximately the same number of calls over time. Use this when call duration is consistent and equal distribution of call count matters more than idle time equalization.

Simultaneous rings all available agents at once. Whoever answers first gets the call. Use this only for small queues where immediate answer time is the priority — ringing ten agents simultaneously for every call creates a poor agent experience.

Weighted distributes calls based on a configured percentage per agent. Use this for queues where agents have different capacity or skill levels and should handle proportionally different volumes.

Queue Capacity and Wait Behavior

Maximum callers in queue — the total number of callers who can be holding before new callers follow the overflow behavior. Set this based on realistic peak volume, not theoretical maximums.

Maximum wait time — the duration a caller can be in queue before being sent to overflow. Configure this in conjunction with queue capacity. Set a realistic wait time threshold that reflects your team’s actual answer speed.

Overflow destination — where calls go when queue capacity or maximum wait time is exceeded. Options are voicemail, transfer to a number, or play an announcement and disconnect. Every queue must have an overflow destination. A queue with no overflow behavior will reject calls silently when it fills.

Hold Music and Comfort Messages

Hold music is configured under the queue’s audio settings. Webex Calling provides default hold music or allows you to upload a custom audio file. For customer-facing queues, custom hold music or branded messaging produces a better caller experience than generic system audio.

Comfort messages are periodic recordings played to callers while they wait. Configure them under Comfort Message in the queue settings. Options include:

Comfort message — plays at configurable intervals (every 30 seconds, every minute, etc.). Use this for queue position announcements or estimated wait time messaging
Comfort message bypass — skips the comfort message if an agent becomes available quickly. Prevents callers from hearing “thank you for holding, your call is important to us” when they’ve only been waiting for 5 seconds

Agent Configuration

Adding agents: Agents are added to the queue under the Agents section of the queue configuration. Any Webex Calling user can be added as an agent. Agents can be members of multiple queues simultaneously.

Agent availability: Agents manage their availability through the Webex App — they can set themselves as available or unavailable for queue calls. An agent who is set to unavailable will not receive queue calls even if they are signed into the Webex App and not on a call.

Wrap-up time: Configure a post-call wrap-up period under the queue settings. Wrap-up time gives agents a brief period after ending a call before the next queue call is routed to them. A queue with no wrap-up time and high volume will route the next call to an agent within seconds of them ending the previous one — productive for throughput, poor for agent experience and call quality.

Allow agents to join and leave: The queue setting that controls whether agents can opt themselves in and out of the queue through the Webex App. Enable this for queues where agent participation is flexible. Disable it for queues where membership is fixed and should be controlled by admins only.

Supervisor Features

Webex Calling call queues include supervisor monitoring features that are worth configuring before go-live for customer-facing queues:

Monitor — supervisors can listen to active calls without the agent or caller knowing. Use for quality assurance and new agent coaching.

Whisper — supervisors can speak to the agent during an active call without the caller hearing. Use for real-time coaching during difficult calls.

Barge — supervisors can join the call as a full participant, audible to both the agent and the caller. Use for escalation scenarios where supervisor intervention is needed.

These features are enabled per supervisor in Control Hub under Management > Users > select supervisor > Calling > Call Queue Supervisor.

Business Hours and After-Hours Queue Behavior

Call queues reference business hours schedules the same way auto attendants do. Outside of business hours, the queue can be configured to:

Play an announcement and disconnect — informs callers the queue is closed
Transfer to a phone number — routes to voicemail, an answering service, or an after-hours contact
Transfer to a different queue — useful for organizations with 24/7 coverage where after-hours calls route to a different agent pool

Configure after-hours behavior explicitly. A call queue with no after-hours configuration will continue attempting to route calls to agents after business hours — calls will ring unavailable agents indefinitely until they hit the maximum wait time and overflow. That is not acceptable behavior for a production deployment.

Connecting Auto Attendants and Call Queues

In most production deployments, auto attendants and call queues work together. The auto attendant handles initial call routing and directs callers to the appropriate queue. Understanding how these objects connect is important for designing a coherent call flow.

A typical production call flow looks like this:

Caller dials the main company number
Main auto attendant answers, plays the menu
Caller presses 1 for Support
Auto attendant transfers to the Support call queue
Call queue manages the hold experience and routes to the next available agent

The auto attendant and call queue are separate objects in Control Hub. The auto attendant references the call queue as a transfer destination. Changes to the auto attendant menu don’t affect the queue, and changes to the queue (adding agents, changing routing) don’t affect the auto attendant. This separation is a feature — it lets you update call routing and queue management independently.

For multi-site deployments, the cleanest architecture is one auto attendant per site with site-specific call queues. A caller who reaches the Chicago auto attendant routes to the Chicago support queue with Chicago agents. If Chicago is unavailable after hours, the Chicago auto attendant can route to a national queue with agents across multiple locations.

Testing Before Go-Live

Auto attendants and call queues should be tested systematically before the number is published or transferred from a legacy system. Work through this checklist before go-live:

Auto attendant testing:

Call the auto attendant from an external number and verify the recording plays correctly
Test every key press option — verify each one routes to the correct destination
Test business hours routing — call during business hours and verify the business hours menu plays
Test after-hours routing — call outside business hours (or temporarily change the schedule) and verify the after-hours behavior
Test holiday routing if go-live is near a scheduled holiday
Test the repeat option — verify it replays the correct menu
Test an unmapped key press — pressing a key with no assignment should replay the menu or play an error message, not disconnect the call

Call queue testing:

Call the queue from an external number with no agents available — verify the overflow behavior works correctly
Call the queue with one agent available — verify the call routes to the correct agent using the configured routing algorithm
Call the queue with all agents busy — verify the caller enters the hold state and hears hold music or comfort messages
Test queue position announcements if configured — verify the position reported is accurate
Test wrap-up time — verify agents have the configured period before the next call arrives
Test after-hours behavior — verify calls route correctly outside of business hours
Test supervisor monitoring features — verify a supervisor can monitor, whisper, and barge active calls

Common Configuration Mistakes

Wrong time zone on the auto attendant or call queue. Business hours routing that applies at the wrong time is one of the most common post-go-live complaints. Verify the time zone on every auto attendant and call queue before go-live.

No overflow destination configured. Hunt groups, auto attendants, and call queues all need an explicit overflow or no-answer destination. Objects with no overflow behavior produce unpredictable results when their normal routing fails — calls may disconnect, loop, or fail silently.

Holiday schedules not maintained annually. Holiday schedules in Webex Calling are date-specific. Last year’s schedule doesn’t automatically apply to this year’s dates. Set a recurring calendar reminder to update holiday dates before they arrive.

Queue with no after-hours behavior. A call queue that continues routing to unavailable agents after business hours will exhaust the maximum wait time and overflow every call. Configure after-hours routing explicitly on every queue.

Auto attendant menus designed for the org chart instead of caller behavior. Options ordered by internal organizational hierarchy rather than caller volume produce poor caller experiences. Design menus for the callers who use them, not the org structure of the company they’re calling.

Recording mismatches. An auto attendant recording that says “press 1 for Sales” when the key press actually routes to Support is a configuration that someone will discover at the worst possible time. Verify every recording matches the key assignment it describes before go-live.

Agents not trained on queue availability management. A call queue where agents don’t understand how to set their availability will have inconsistent coverage. Train agents on Webex App availability management before go-live.

Final Thoughts

Hunt groups, auto attendants, and call queues are the parts of a Webex Calling deployment that callers interact with directly — they never see Control Hub, they never know what PSTN option you chose, but they absolutely notice whether the phone system routes their call correctly on the first try. Getting these right is where deployment quality becomes visible.

The configurations themselves are not complex. What makes them go wrong is skipping the design step — opening Control Hub before the call flow is documented, configuring menus without knowing what the recordings will say, deploying queues without discussing agent availability expectations with the team. Take the design seriously and the configuration is straightforward.

For the networking foundation that supports all of this, the Webex Calling Network Requirements — QoS, Firewall Ports, and Split Tunneling article covers what the network needs to look like for queue calls and auto attendant transfers to perform reliably.