Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Overview

Yeastar P-Series Cloud Edition integrates a free IVR system. This topic describes what is IVR, what you can do with IVR, and what is multi-level IVR.

What is IVR?

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated telephony technology that interacts with callers, gathers information, and routes calls to the appropriate destinations. IVR can act as a virtual receptionist to handle large volumes of calls. It means that you don’t need a dedicated person to redirect calls to appropriate departments. With IVR, customers can get quick response or access appropriate service on their own.

What you can do with IVR?

Yeastar IVR uses customizable voice prompts to provide callers with instructions and directions for accessing information via phone, such as “press 1 for sales, and press 2 to leave a message.”. IVR connects callers to individuals, departments, call queues, etc, based on the customers' selections from voice menus.

Multi-level IVR is an alternative that allows you to assign a new IVR to an IVR option, and provides more powerful options to route incoming calls. Multi-level IVR gives you the flexibility to classify the menu of an interaction, such as divides a sales department into regions, and routes calls more precisely.

You can customize your IVR to provide a seamless experience.
For customer
  • Play personal greeting to make the customer feel welcome.
  • Allow customer to leave a voicemail.
  • Allow customer to call employees directly by dialing extension or by name.
For employee
  • Allow employees to make an outbound call via an IVR.
  • Allow employees to check voicemail via an IVR.
  • Allow employees to remotely change IVR prompt by dialing the feature code #9.

IVR keypress events

There are three types of keypress events:
  • Menu options: The number keys, # key and * key for users to access a desired destination.
  • Timeout: If no input is detected after the configured timeout, the PBX will forward the call based on the configuration.
  • Invalid: When an invalid key is pressed, route the call to a desired destination.
Keypress destination
The following options are available for you to assign to the keypress events:
  • Hang Up: End the current call.
  • Extension: Route the call to the specified extension.
  • Extension Voicemail: Allow callers to leave a message for the specified extension.
  • Group Voicemail: Allow callers to leave a message for a queue, a ring group, or a custom group.
  • IVR: Allow callers to enter another IVR menu.
  • Ring Group: Route the call to a specified ring group.
  • Queue: Route the call to a specified queue.
  • Conference: Route the call to a specified conference.
  • Dial by Name: Allow callers to place a call by extension user's name.

    For more information, see Allow Callers to Dial by Name via IVR.

  • External Number: Route the call to an external number.
  • Play Prompt and Exit: Play a custom prompt, and then hang up the call.
  • Play Prompt and Return to IVR: Play a custom prompt, and then back to the IVR.
  • Play IVR Prompt: Play the IVR prompt, and then hang up the call.
    Note:
    • The option is only available for Invalid Input Destination.
    • When callers enter a DTMF digit that is not defined in the IVR, the system would repeat the IVR prompt. If the play counts of the IVR prompt reach the maximum number of times, the system would directly hang up the call.