Snom IVR trees, 4S Frequently Asked Questions Manual

F REQUENTLY
A SKED
Q UESTION

IVR trees on the snom 4S

Media Server

Date: Feb-11-2004
Author: Christian Stredicke
Document: faq-04-02-11-cs

2 snom technology AG

[ F R E Q U E N T L Y A S K E D Q U E S T I O N ]

IVR Trees 3

[ F R E Q U E N T L Y A S K E D Q U E S T I O N ]

In many situations, persons who call
businesses have standard requests like talking
to accounting department, price quotes, etc.
Modern telephone system offer interactive
voice prompts to reduce the number of calls
hitting an attendant.

One way to do this is to use an auto
attendant. This method is especially helpful
when the caller already knows the extension
number. The caller just enters the extension
number and gets connected. A prompt may
give additional help to nd the right extension
("For talking to our accounting department
press 12, for talking to our reservation
department press 13"). However, this kind of
IVR offers only one level of interaction.

In order to build up more complex IVR
trees, the snom 4S media server contains an
additional account type, the "Dispatcher". This
FAQ explains how to use the dispatcher.

1. Dene your IVR tree

As a rst step, you should make a plan
on how the IVR tree should look like. One
good way it to use a spreadsheet tool to list
the necessary accounts, the links to other

accounts and the prompts. Figure 1 shows an
example of such a sheet.

For every submenu, you need to set up
another dispatcher account. Jumping between
the different menus works just like transferring
the calls. The logic of the media server makes
sure that the caller is not involved in the
necessary transfers.

2. Set up the Accounts

The second step is to set up the accounts
on the media server. You set the dispatcher
accounts up like you set all other accounts up
(see the media server manual on how to do
this). You should register the top-level account
which is being called (in the example in gure
1, 800). Usually it is not necessary to register
accounts that serve as submenus as the
media server switches between the accounts
internally without consulting the proxy.
However, to simply the setup procedure, you
should also register the submenu accounts
(you will then be able to call them easily).

Each account has a list of redirect targets
for the keys 0..9, # and * (# is represented
by redirect_target_p and * is represented by
redirect_target_s). If in the submenu that the

Figure 1: Typical spreadsheet for planning the IVR tree