Track Calls in Real-Time: monitoring IVR usage

A phone menu is a bit of a black box until you can watch what callers do inside it. VICIdial gives you two things that help: live tracking of calls sitting in a menu, and logging of the keys callers press. Turn both on and you stop guessing whether people understand your options.

Show menu calls on the live screen

Each Call menu has a setting that controls whether its calls appear on the live screen as incoming menu calls. It is on by default, which is what you want. With it on, a call sitting in your IVR (interactive voice response) shows up as an active call rather than vanishing until it reaches a queue. The real-time view is VICIdial's Real-time report, the dashboard that shows current activity across the system.

There is also a tracking group setting. It tags menu calls with an ID so you can group them when you look at IVR usage later. You can use the default tracking group or one tied to a specific in-group, depending on how you want the numbers to break down.

Log which keys callers press

The more useful insight comes from logging key presses. Turn on the log key press option and VICIdial records the DTMF choice each caller makes in that menu. That tells you which options get used and which get ignored. If option 3 never gets pressed, maybe nobody needs it, or maybe your prompt is unclear.

You can take it a step further with the log field setting, which stores the caller's response into a chosen field on the lead record, such as comments or even the Vendor lead code. That makes the menu choice travel with the call into your agent screen and reports.

sequenceDiagram
  participant C as Caller
  participant M as Call Menu
  participant R as Real-time Report
  participant L as Log
  C->>M: Enters menu
  M->>R: Show as IVR call
  C->>M: Presses key
  M->>L: Record key press
  M->>C: Route to chosen option

Reading the numbers

Watch the live screen during a busy hour to spot calls stuck in the menu, then use the logged key presses afterward to see the pattern. A Disposition, the outcome code an agent sets when a call ends, tells you what happened after the menu. Pair the two and you get the whole journey from greeting to result. If a lot of callers press the same key and then hang up before an agent answers, that points at a staffing gap behind one option, not a menu problem. If they press the wrong key often, the prompt wording is the thing to fix.

For the bigger context of how menus feed your queues, see our inbound call handling guide. And to dig into the queue-side numbers, read about the VICIdial inbound group report.

If you want all of this reporting working out of the box without standing up your own server, our managed VICIdial hosting has the live screen and logging ready from the first call.