Specific Call Hunt Features

I am researching hosted VOIP solutions for the company I work for. We are trying to find out if anyone offers call hunting which can recognize that outside voicemail system has answered and instead of terminating the call, continues to hunt for an available person. In other words, my call hunt list would include my external cell phone - if I did not answer that but my voicemail did, I want the call hunt to continue to the next number in my hunt list. Most places I've spoken to have said that their systems cannot detect the difference between a voicemail or person answering, so the call would terminate at my cell phone voicemail and the caller would have to leave a message there. Does anyone know of any VOIP solutions whose call hunt works the way I need?

Greetings jschultz and welcome to Voipuser

In most respects you answered your own question. When you think about it an answering machine taking the call is the same as a human, for that reason you will have to use some simpler logic.

Why not just look for a hunt service that will call each number in a seaquence for say 20 seconds before automatically disconnecting and trying the next.

You can set auto answer in your own cell phone to 30 seconds so it still picks up messages from persistant direct callers. (Follow this rule for any other answering machine in the system). Inbound callers will always find a real person, you can always add an answering machine at the very end of the hunt group as a failsafe.

Hunt groups are old fashioned PSTN - they were designed to work by sequentially calling numbers only because they could not call all the numbers you might be on simultaneously.

In practice, if you hadn't answered the call within 15-20 seconds your caller had hung up anyway and post sending delay took about half of that - more to a mobile.

With VoIP you can call all your numbers at once - just answer the phone you're nearest to at the time.