Menu Prompt: the greeting your IVR plays

Every IVR (interactive voice response) opens with a greeting, the recording that says "thank you for calling, press 1 for sales." In a VICIdial call menu, that greeting is set in the Menu Prompt field. It is a small field with a few useful tricks.

What the Menu Prompt field holds

The Menu Prompt holds the file name of the audio that plays at the start of the Call menu. This is the first thing a caller hears, so it normally lists the options they can press.

You are not limited to one file. Enter several prompts separated by a pipe character and they play one after another. That lets you stitch a fixed welcome message together with a separate options recording without re-recording the whole thing every time the options change.

Two flags worth knowing

Place NOINT directly in front of a prompt file name, with no space, and callers cannot interrupt that message with a keypress. It must sit in front of the file name as a flag, not be part of the file name itself. Use it for legal disclosures or recording notices you want callers to hear in full.

A second flag, NOPLAY, is for debugging or for setups that use an Answer configuration for inbound calls. It tells the menu not to play that prompt. You will not use it day to day, but it is handy to recognize when you see it.

How the prompt fits the call flow

sequenceDiagram
  participant C as Caller
  participant M as Call Menu
  participant A as Agent Group
  C->>M: Reaches the menu
  M->>C: Plays Menu Prompt
  C->>M: Presses a key
  M->>A: Routes to chosen ingroup
  A->>C: Agent answers

There are other prompt fields nearby that do related jobs: a timeout prompt that plays when the caller waits too long, and an invalid prompt for when they press an unmapped key. Both default to playing nothing. The Menu Prompt itself is the one callers always hear, so it deserves the most care.

Keep the greeting short and lead with the most common option. A caller pressing a key fires a DTMF tone the menu matches to a route, so once they know the layout they will press through before the prompt even finishes. After the prompt, most options send the call into an Ingroup where an agent picks up.

Two small habits keep greetings working well. First, record the prompt at the same volume and format as your other system audio, so a caller does not get a sudden jump in loudness mid-call. Second, when you change the options, update the recording in the same pass; nothing frustrates a caller more than a greeting that says press 3 for an option that no longer exists. Because you can chain files with the pipe, you can keep a stable welcome clip and only re-record the short options clip when the routing changes.

To make sure those groups are ready before you record a greeting, follow adding an inbound group, and see how prompts, menus, and groups connect in the inbound call handling guide.

Uploading and testing prompt audio is easiest on a live box. If you want a system ready to take inbound calls in under a minute, see our managed VICIdial hosting.