What the VERM IVR Goals report shows

The VERM IVR Goals report answers one question: which calls actually made it through your menus to a queue, and how did they get there. In VERM terms a goal is a call that reached a Call queue — as opposed to a call that hung up or went unanswered inside the menu. This report lists every goal reached for the calls matching your report parameters, alongside the traversal path that led to it.

One line per path to a goal

If a single goal is reached through more than one path, each path shows up as its own line. So a "Sales queue" goal that callers reach both directly and through a billing submenu appears twice, once per route. Each line shows the final selection or keypress option followed to reach the goal, the number of calls that took that exact path, and the average, minimum, and maximum call length for those calls.

That length stat is the call's time inside the IVR (interactive voice response) up to the goal, not talk time with an agent. A goal with a long average length means callers wade through a lot of prompts before they reach the queue, which is worth trimming even when the goal rate looks fine.

Goals are not answered calls

Keep that distinction front of mind. The IVR Goals report measures the menu's job — did it route the call where you intended. Whether the queue then served the caller is a separate measurement that lives in the agent and ingroup reports. So treat a healthy goal rate as evidence your menu design is good, then go check queue staffing before you celebrate.

Comparing paths to the same goal is where this report earns its keep. If two routes feed the same queue and one has a much longer average length, the longer route has redundant prompts you can cut. If one route to a goal carries almost no calls, you may not need it at all.

The minimum and maximum length columns are easy to skip past, but they flag edge cases the average hides. A goal whose minimum length is near zero usually means a few callers blew straight through the menu — they already knew the keys to press. A maximum length far above the average points at callers who hesitated or replayed prompts. Neither is automatically a problem, but a wide spread between minimum and maximum on a high-volume goal is a sign the prompt reads clearly to some callers and not others.

When a goal feeds an Ingroup, the goal count is also a sanity check on routing. If the menu reports many goals into a queue but that queue shows little activity in the agent reports, the routing target is probably pointing at the wrong place — fix it before you touch the prompts.

How a goal is counted

flowchart TD
  A[Call enters IVR] --> B{Follows a traversal path}
  B --> C{Reaches a queue}
  C -->|yes| D[Counted as a goal]
  C -->|no hangup| E[Not a goal]
  D --> F[Listed by path in IVR Goals]
  F --> G[Shows calls per path]
  G --> H[Shows avg min max length]

To see what happened after the goal, follow the call into the queue-level views. The VICIdial reports overview maps which report covers each stage, and the whiteboard report is handy for watching live queue load while you tune the routes feeding it. For a single DID (direct inward dialing), drop into IVR Details to confirm the goals attributed to it are correct.

VICIfast hosts managed VICIdial with VERM enabled out of the box, on a dedicated server with a branded subdomain over HTTPS in under 40 seconds. Bring your own carrier and start reading goals the first day — see pricing.