Auto Attendant

Auto Attendant

Auto Attendant is a flexible utility designed to greet callers and transfer them either to an existing PortaSwitch accounts, or to your current phone system.

Basic concept

• PortaUM Auto Attendant (AA) is composed of a set of menus.
• All the menus are the same in every respect, except for the ROOT menu, which is always present and cannot be deleted, and whose name cannot be changed.
• When a caller dials the system, AA will answer the call with the Intro prompt from the ROOT menu.
• After this, the Menu prompt will be played, and AA will listen to the user input.
• The user input will trigger execution of the following available actions:
  • Default - plays the default prompt from the current menu
  • Transfer - transfers the call to a given telephone number or extension
  • Menu - starts interpreting (executing) the selected menu; the user can choose from any of the available menus
• The user may select whether the corresponding prompt is to be played prior to the action.

A menu call flow chart is displayed in the diagram below:

Menu List mode
Auto Attendant can be selected from the Options menu. The main screen lists all the menus available in the system.

To modify one of the existing menus, select its name from the list.

To add a new menu, select Add new from the action panel.

Menu Edit mode

After selecting one of the existing menus, please allow all the prompts to load in your browser; this may be viewed on the status indicator in the action pane.

The fields of the Menu Edit screen are explained below:

Name
A logical name for the menu, i.e. Sales for a sales department

Active
Time definition when the current menu is active. To set the menu as always active, select the Always button on the right. PortaUM also provides users with a Period Wizard, a flexible tool for defining a time period of any complexity.
Intro, Menu, Default These three fields work similarly to the Voicemail recording feature.

- Record. Select to start recording your voice prompt. (You will need to connect a microphone to your computer sound card to use this feature.)
After the existing prompt is recorded over, the Undo icon becomes available, allowing rollback to the previous state. The blinking Play icon indicates that the existing prompt is being overwritten, but changes have not been saved yet.

- Stop. Select this to stop recording or playback of the recorded message.

- Play. Select this to play back the recorded prompt. When selected, this icon will turn into - Pause.

Each of the icons above may appear in grayscale, meaning it cannot be accessed because some other task is active.

To give your Auto Attendant a professional sound, we recommend using a professional speaker and a digital recording studio when recording voice prompts.

To upload a prompt, select the Browse... button on the right side. The native audio file format for the system is the following:

Type: NeXT/Sun (Java) file .au
Format: G.711 u-Law
Attributes: 8,000 Hz, 8-bit, Mono

Here's a short list of supported audio file formats:

Event Table