How to point a DID at a call menu

When one phone number needs to serve sales, support, and billing all at once, you don't hand it to a single team. You point it at a menu. In VICIdial a DID (direct inward dialing) (Direct Inward Dialing number, the actual number a carrier delivers to your system) can route into a Call menu, which plays a recorded greeting and lets callers press a key to pick where they go.

This is the classic press-one IVR (interactive voice response) (Interactive Voice Response) setup: "Press 1 for sales, press 2 for support." Each option drops the caller into a different Ingroup (an inbound queue that agents log into). Here is how to wire it up.

Build the call menu first

Go to the Inbound section and click Add New Call Menu. Give it a Menu ID like WELCOME_MENU and a name. After you submit, more fields appear.

• Menu Prompt: the audio that greets the caller. You can chain several audio files separated by pipe characters, so one field can play a welcome clip, then the for-sales and for-tech-support prompts.
• Menu Invalid Prompt: what plays if the caller presses a key that has no option.
• Menu Repeat: how many times the menu replays before giving up. Two is a sensible start.

Then add one Option per key. For each, pick the digit from the dropdown, set a Description, set Route to INGROUP, and choose the In-Group it feeds. The Handle Method (CID by default) controls how the system records the caller as a Lead. Click submit and wait about a minute for the change to take effect.

Point the DID at the menu

Now click Add A New DID. Enter the DID Extension (the inbound number, no spaces or punctuation) and a description, then submit. On the next screen set Active to Y, set DID Route to CALLMENU, and choose your WELCOME_MENU from the Call Menu dropdown. Submit and wait up to a minute.

That is the whole chain. A call arrives on the number, the menu plays, the caller presses a key, and they land in the matching queue. Notice that the menu and the DID are two separate records. The menu holds the audio and the option-to-queue mapping; the DID just says "send this number to that menu." Keeping them apart means one menu can serve several numbers, and a number can be re-pointed at a different menu later without rebuilding the options.

A small thing that trips people up: the digit you choose for an option is what the caller actually presses. If your prompt says "press 1 for sales" but the option is set to 2, the call goes nowhere useful. Match the recorded audio to the option digits and test the line by calling in yourself once it is live.

How the call flows

flowchart TD
  A[Caller dials DID] --> B[DID Route is CALLMENU]
  B --> C[Welcome menu plays]
  C --> D{Which key}
  D -->|Press 1| E[Sales in-group]
  D -->|Press 2| F[Support in-group]
  D -->|Invalid| G[Invalid prompt then repeat]
  E --> H[Agent answers]
  F --> H

Where this fits

Pointing a DID at a menu is one route option among several. The same DID could instead go straight to an Agent (a logged-in user taking calls), to a voicemail box, or directly into a single queue, all controlled by the DID Route field. The menu is the right choice whenever one number serves more than one team and you want callers to sort themselves. For the full picture of how inbound calls move through the system, read our VICIdial inbound call handling guide. If you want to skip the menu and send the number straight into a single queue instead, see how to create an inbound group that takes calls.

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