Call menu

A call menu is the recorded greeting and keypad prompt that meets an inbound caller — "Press 1 for sales, press 2 for support." Some people call it an IVR (interactive voice response) or an auto-attendant. In VICIdial it's a building block you point your numbers at so callers get sorted before a person ever picks up.

Why it matters: it puts each caller in the right line without an agent doing triage. Sales calls land with salespeople, support calls land with support, and your team stops wasting the first thirty seconds of every call figuring out why someone called. On a Blended dialing team, that sorting is what lets the dialer route each caller to whoever can actually help.

What a menu can do

• Send each keypress to a different Ingroup, so option 1 and option 2 reach different teams.
• Chain into another menu — a sub-menu under a menu — for deeper trees.
• Read something back with TTS (text to speech), or run logic through an AGI (Asterisk Gateway Interface) script for anything fancier.

You attach a menu to an inbound number — a DID (direct inward dialing) — and from there callers flow into your queues. This is also where a Press 1 style choice lives, where pressing a single key moves the caller forward.

Keep menus short. Two or three options people understand beats a long tree that makes callers mash zero to escape. Always give people a way to reach a human, record your prompts clearly, and test the whole thing by calling in yourself before you put it live — it's the first impression every inbound caller gets.

Plan what happens when an option leads nowhere, too. If your support line is closed for the night, the menu should say so and offer a callback or a voicemail rather than dumping the caller into a queue no one is watching. The menu is only as good as the dead ends you've thought through, and a caller who hits silence after pressing a key remembers it far longer than the thirty seconds it took to record a better prompt.