How to Read the VICIdial Inbound IVR / Callmenu Report

When callers hit a 'press 1 for sales, press 2 for support' menu before they reach a person, you want to know which choices they actually make and where they fall out. The Inbound IVR / Callmenu Report traces the path each caller took through your call menus and, optionally, on into in-groups. An IVR (interactive voice response) menu is exactly that set of recorded options, and this report is how you grade it.

The headline totals

The first block of stats is the big picture: the total number of calls that came into your call menus, the total that arrived with no caller ID information at all, and the count of unique caller IDs in the period. The missing-caller-ID figure is a quiet useful one; a sudden jump can hint at upstream carrier issues or spoofing. Each menu the caller meets is built from a Call menu entry in your admin.

The path breakdown

The main section ranks every path callers took through your menus, most popular first. The first column is the total calls that took that path. The next column is how many of those calls went into an Ingroup. The column after that shows how many of those queued calls dropped, followed by that figure as a percentage, which is effectively a per-path Drop rate you can compare across options.

Two timing columns finish the picture. One shows the average time the caller spent in the menu listening to prompts, and the other the average total length of calls that used that path. The last column is the actual path itself, written as each step separated by a slash so you can read the journey left to right.

Note: a long average prompt time on a popular path is a flag. If callers spend ages in the menu before they even reach a queue, the wording is too long or the options are confusing, and your drop percentage on that path usually follows it upward.

Reading a path's journey

flowchart TD
  A[Caller enters call menu] --> B{Presses a key}
  B -->|1| C[Sub menu]
  B -->|2| D[Sent to in-group]
  C --> E[Sent to in-group]
  D --> F{Waits in queue}
  E --> F
  F -->|Connects| G[Counted on path]
  F -->|Hangs up| H[Counted as drop]

Read top to bottom: callers who pick a path either reach a queue and connect, or drop while waiting, and both outcomes are tallied against that path's row. A path with high volume and a high drop percentage is your first thing to fix, whether that means shortening a prompt or sending those callers to a healthier Ingroup. For the wider context, see the VICIdial reports guide, and for the VERM version of menu traversal read VERM IVR traversal paths explained.

Building call menus and reading their reports is a lot smoother on a server set up for VICIdial out of the box. See VICIfast pricing for what that looks like.