Asterisk Tutorial 31 — Basic Asterisk IVR Configuration
Configuring an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu can be tricky at the best of times, but configuring an Asterisk IVR menu requires a certain amount of prior planning and knowledge of using the Asterisk Command Line Interface (CLI). Moreover, as we demonstrated in last week’s tutorial, your IVR needs to be not just okay, but excellent as IVRs are the first point of contact where an incoming caller starts to form an impression about your company — so it might be a good idea to also refer to our IVR best practices again to make sure you don’t make a rubbish IVR / AutoAttendant.
Mathias’ Top Tip
When configuring your IVR menus in Asterisk, it is essential that every level of your IVR menu has its own unique Context within your Dialplan. Otherwise, once an option number is used, you will not be able to use it again and you could well start sending your callers unintentionally to the back end of beyond of your dialplan which obviously would be very bad for customer service. Failing to do so will also have the negative impact of meaning that you will not be able to use the same extension again when configuring a different IVR menu.
Stay tuned for next time when we will build on this configuration, making it more advanced and how to configure timeout and invalid key entry actions.
More Info
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Until next time — Happy VoIPing!
