Hi I am setting up a phone system with freebpx for our company. I am wondering if there is an option (other then making a recording) for me to have the user press a number lets say 1 to access a company directory where all the employs names and extensions will be heard one by one, and the user can then dial the extensions that they want.
I know I can use the directory module to use dial by name option but that is not what I want… any help is appreciated thanks
What I just heard you say is “I want to have the system dial-by-name, but I don’t want to use the dial-by-name module.”
I’m sure that’s not what you meant, so could you explain the Use Case a little bit more for us?
I want the caller to hear the names and extensions of each employ being read to him and then giving him the option of dialing the extensions he/she wants.
I don’t want the caller to have to know the name of the person he wants to contact
use an ivr with extension dialing enabled - i.e for joe smith press 1000, for mary smith press 1001, etc. if the list is really long consider breaking it up by department - i.e for sales press 1 and then have a sales ivr that lists names and extensions.
A caller doesn’t know who he wants to contact. Hmmm. Interesting.
How exactly will the caller decide which person (or place) to call ? Random ?
If a name is not used as the relevant call selection criteria, what else do you intend to use ?
OK - so you want “For Sales, press '501;, for Jim, press ‘502’; for Leroy Llama, The Company Mascot, press ‘503’.”
The Company Menards does this - it’s really cool for the first seven or eight names - then it starts to get really, really old. By the time I get to “Shipping - Extension 20”, I’m so mad at the company I want to cancel my order.
There’s no automated way to do this right now - if you wanted to make this happen, you’d need to create a custom-context (at least).
The way it’s done now is that someone records the message and connects it to an IVR with “Direct Dialing” (or whatever that option is called) enabled.
An option for creating this file would be an external program that read through the company directory and used TTS (Text To Speech) to create the greeting file. This makes it a little more dynamic, but doesn’t always sound great. I used a system like this for a while - the audio was OK, but it’s not something I’d implement for a customer.