Auto-attendant is an IVR Applications used to dispatch calls to different agent queues depending on the choice pressed by the caller.
How it works
Let’s say your call center provides different services. You can create an IVR script that plays an audio file telling the caller to:
· Press 1 if you want billing information
· Press 2 if you want to check your order status
· Press 3 for general inquiry
The application has to collect the choice from the customer and route the call to the appropriate queue.
Step 1: Define Prerequisites
Before designing the IVR flow, you need to do the following in advance:
- Upload an audio file (Tools –> Sounds)
- Create queues (Voice –>Queues)
- Create agents (Staff –>Agents) and add agents to queues
Step 2 : Design the flow
The following figure shows an example of an auto-attendant IVR flow that routes calls to sales queue, support queue or to an agent:
Analyzing the Tree you may notice when a call gets into the system it performs the following steps:
- Start block initializes the call flow and answers the voice channel if you set Answer to Yes (it’s mandatory to start an IVR flow with a Start block)
- Menu block plays the audio message
- If the caller makes a valid choice, the application will route the call to one of the queues or directly to an agent.
In the following picture, you can see how the Menu block can to be configured: