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You have made an invalid selection.
Please try again.
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a These files don’t exist anywhere as of yet. We’re using these as examples.
b This pattern match must be relevant to your extension range.
Let’s go over the various components of this template. Then we’ll show you the
dialplan code required to implement it, as well as how to create prompts for it.
Designing Your AA
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249
The Greeting
The first thing the caller hears is actually two prompts.
The first prompt is the greeting. The only thing the greeting should do is greet the
caller. Examples of a greeting might be “Thank you for calling Bryant, Van Meggelen,
and Associates,” “Welcome to Leif ’s School of Wisdom and T-Shirt Design,” or “You
have reached the offices of Dewey, Cheetum, and Howe, Attorneys.” That’s it—the
choices for the caller will come later. This allows you to record different greetings
without having to record a whole new menu. For example, for a few weeks each year
you might want your greeting to say “Season’s greetings” or whatever, but your menu
will not need to change. Also, if you want to play a different recording after hours
(“Thank you for calling. Our office is now closed.”), you can use different greetings,
but the heart of the menu can stay the same. Finally, if you want to be able to return
callers to the menu from a different part of the system, you will normally not want
them to hear the greeting again.
The Main Menu
The main menu prompt is where you inform your callers of the choices available
to them. You should speak this as quickly as possible (without sounding rushed or
silly).3 When you record a choice, always tell the users the action that will be taken
before giving them the digit option to take that action. So, don’t say “press 1 for sales,”
but rather say “for sales, press 1.” The reason for this is that most people will not pay
full attention to the prompt until they hear the choice that is of interest to them. Once
they hear their choice, you will have their full attention and can tell them what button
to press to get them to where they want to go.
Another point to consider is what order to put the choices in. A typical business, for
example, will want sales to be the first menu choice, and most callers will expect this
as well. The important thing is to think of your callers. For example, most people will
not be interested in address and fax information, so don’t make that the first choice.4
Think about the goal of getting the callers to their intended destinations as quickly as
possible when you make your design choices. Ruthlessly cut anything that is not
absolutely essential.
3 If necessary, you can use an audio editing program such as Audacity to remove silence, and even to speed up
the recording a bit.
4 In fact, we don’t normally recommend this in an AA because it adds to what the caller has to listen to, and
most people will go to a website for this sort of information.
250
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Chapter 14: The Automated Attendant
Selection 1
Option 1 in our example will be a simple transfer. Normally this would be to a
resource located in another context, and it would typically have an internal extension
number so that internal users could also transfer calls to it. In this example, we are
going to use this option to send callers to the queue called sales that was created in
Chapter 12.
Selection 2
Option 2 will be technically identical to option 1. Only the destination will be differ‐
ent. This selection will transfer callers to the support queue.
Selection #
It’s good to have the option for the directory as close to the beginning of the record‐
ing as possible. Many people will use a directory if they know it is there, but can’t be
bothered to listen to the whole menu prompt to find out about it. Impatient people
will press 0, so the sooner you tell them about the directory, the better the odds that
they’ll use it, and thus reduce the workload on your receptionist.
Selection 3
When you have an option that does nothing but play a recording back to the caller
(such as address and fax information), you can leave all the code for that in the same
context as the menu, and simply return the caller to the main menu prompt at the
end of the recording. In general, these sorts of options are not as useful as we would
like to think they are, so in most cases you’ll probably want to leave this out.
Selection 9
It is very important to give the caller the option to hear the choices again. Many peo‐
ple will not be paying attention throughout the whole menu, and if you don’t give
them the option to hear the choices again, they will most likely press 0.