What a call menu (IVR) is in VICIdial

If you have ever heard "press 1 for sales, press 2 for support," you have used an IVR. In VICIdial that feature is called a call menu. An IVR (interactive voice response), short for Interactive Voice Response, plays a recorded greeting and then waits for the caller to press a key to choose where their call should go.

What a call menu does

A Call menu greets the caller, plays your options, and then reacts to the digit they press. Each digit is mapped to a destination you choose. The caller hears the prompt, presses a key, and the system sends them on without an agent ever touching the call.

The keypress is read as a DTMF tone, the same beeps your phone makes when you dial. The menu matches that tone to one of its defined options and follows the route attached to it.

Where a call menu can send callers

A single menu option can route a caller to any of these:

• An extension in any dialplan context, including Asterisk-based IVRs
• A phone configured in the VICIdial interface
• An inbound group, so the call queues for live agents
• Another call menu, which is how you build a treed, multi-level menu
• A DID, voicemail, an AGI script, or a plain hangup after a message

Because one option can point at another menu, you can build layered trees: a main menu sends "press 2 for support" into a second menu that asks "press 1 for billing, press 2 for technical." That is the foundation of any larger Auto attendant.

How a call moves through the menu

flowchart TD
  A[Caller reaches call menu] --> B[Greeting prompt plays]
  B --> C{Caller presses a key}
  C -->|1| D[Inbound group queue]
  C -->|2| E[Another call menu]
  C -->|3| F[Voicemail]
  C -->|No input| G[Timeout action]
  C -->|Wrong key| H[Invalid action]

Menus also handle the cases where the caller says nothing or presses a key you did not define. A timeout action covers silence, and an invalid action covers an unrecognized key, so no caller gets stuck. You decide what each of those does, the same way you set the numbered options. A common, friendly pattern is to route both back into a live queue rather than hang up, so a confused caller still reaches a person.

A call menu is also a good filter before agents ever get involved. By splitting sales, support, and billing at the front door, the right team takes each call and your queues stay cleaner. You can even gate the menu by time of day so calls outside business hours go to voicemail instead of ringing an empty floor.

Call menus live in the inbound section right next to inbound groups and DIDs. A common pattern is a DID that points at a call menu, and each menu option that routes into an inbound group. To learn where those groups fit, read what an inbound group is, and for the end-to-end flow see the inbound call handling guide.

Building and recording IVR prompts is easier on a system that is already running. If you want a box that can take inbound calls in under a minute, see our managed VICIdial hosting.