Auto Attendant

Send calls to the right number

In many office environments calls land on a single phone number. In the USA and Canada, this is typically the company "DID", in other countries that is typically the number of the company without a specific purpose. Most of the calls can be routed to the right destination without human involvement, just by the caller entering on their phone pad who they want to talk to. This saves time for the office staff and gets callers connected to the right location around the clock. The auto attendant in the Vodia PBX performs that function.

The first impression

When the calls hits the auto attendant, you can have the system play a customized message to greet your callers. The system will establish a simple dialog with the caller, using prerecorded and your own recordings. The caller can also select the language from the auto attendant. The annoucement for the language selection is made in the to-be selected language, so that the caller can actually understand it.

Your own recordings. You can use your extension to record your company's greeting message. This is easy and very flexible. You can use this feature to rapidly change your annoucements, for example on snow days. If you prefer a professional impression, you can upload recordings through the web interface into the system. You can have multiple recordings for different situations and then enable them through service flags. This way you can have different annoucements during office hours, holidays and weekends.
Prerecorded recordings. There is a number of prerecorded annoucements available that you can use to send calls to the accounting department, sales, support, the front desk, medial services and many other destinations. Those can be mixed with your own recordings. If you like, you can have the PBX mix the prompts with music on hold-sources.

Dial by name

If the caller already knows the extension number, she can call that number from the auto attendant. When callers are looking for a specific person, they can use the dial by name feature of the auto attendant. In this case the user can use the dial pad to enter the letters of the name. When there are enough digits, the PBX can match a specific extension and offer to dial the extension. If the extension has recorded her name, it will annouce the name before dialling the number. You may specify which extensions are not available for outside callers and which have to go through a screening process.

Call redirection

There are several ways for redirecting calls. When the user has used the redirection features of the extension, the auto attendant will use those settings for redirecting the call. If a user is busy, the auto attendant may offer the caller a callback when the user becomes available again. This saves precious time for trying again and again to reach the extension. Redirections can also be programmed to central numbers when the call hits a mailbox. This avoids that every extension has to set this up on their own.

After a timeout of inactivity, the PBX disconnects the call. This solves problems with analog gateways that are not able to detect caller hang-up and with robocalls.

The administrator can specify what action should be taken when someone enters a extension number. Instead of calling the extension, which is the default action, the attendant can also call the mailbox, log into the hot desking account or start the call review for recorded calls.

Anonymous calls

Extensions can require callers to first leave their name before the calls gets put through to their extension. This can be required for anonymous calls that don't present a caller-ID or for all external calls. The extension can then decide weather to take the call or reject it. Callers that have a caller-ID can also be put on the rejection list in the address book of the extension. This is a effective way to fend off robocalls and other calls from unwelcome callers.