Play an Announcement “Thank you for calling Company Name”. Just to get that greeting out of the way no matter what happens downstream.
Go to Call Flow Control. Normally this goes through to the IVR, but if there is adverse weather and we are (or are not) going to present that evening’s performance we play an Announcement - and then go to the IVR.
And after implementing this in anticipation of last Saturday’s freezing rain alert, this raised two questions from the box office volunteers:
Can we turn off/on CFC from home and entering the *28 code, or do we have to do this onsite?
Can we remotely re-record the message we play? Enter the *29 code remotely and update the announcement?
And this generated a new request: I used to be able to get into voicemail by entering the hidden code xx as soon as the system answered (it used to go straight to the IVR), but now I have to wait until I hear “Please select one of the following four options” before the hidden code is recognized.
Options I am aware of:
More user education: Sorry, this is the way it works, wait until “Please select ..”
Add more hidden options to the IVR for star-28x and star-29yy.
Dial the extension for the voicemailbox right away, then *98
Is there a simple way to enable star-options on an external call? If needed I could easily add a dedicated unpublished phone number, and assign that to a unique Inbound Route. I have seen mentions about the context from-internal instead of from-pstn, and they suggest there is a possibility here. Under Feature Codes we would disable almost all feature codes (we don’t use almost all of them), and make sure there are passwords on the remainder.
The technology used to connect the building to the Internet doesn’t have a static IP option, so using NoIP/DynDNS and setting up a remote VPN would allow me to console in, but I want to offload this workload to the box office staff and thus keep it to star-codes and a deskset.
All of these things are easily doable out of the box without having to use the from-internal context (definitely want to avoid that if you can).
In your IVR define options define hidden options for:
Feature code admin > {desired Call Flow Control Code}
Feature code admin > {Edit Recording for the proper recording code}
Feature code admin > Dial Voice Mail <*98>
You will want to make sure that you have a password on both the recording (in Admin > System Recordings > {Recording Name} > Feature Code Password and also on the Call Flow Control in Applications > Call Flow Control > {desired CFC feature code} > Optional Password.
Finally, of you want to be able to dial a code, such as a * as soon as a recording starts, the recording would need to be a part of the IVR and the call would need to start with the IVR. So for instance, instead of having a call flow of Announcement > CFC > IVR you may want to eliminate the announcement and have you call flow be CFC > IVR. That or set up a separate DID just for checking voice mail and have it go to an IVR with a hidden option, like star, to go to the dial voice mail feature code.
Indeed, I already have a hidden code in the IVR for voicemail pickup. The original deployment had the incoming call go straight to the IVR and remote users got in the habit of entering the hidden code right away - but pulling the greeting “Thank you for calling company name” means they had to wait for the IVR.
Oh dear, why do we have to wait? I’m used to just punching in the code as soon as it answers.
Why pull the greeting forward into an announcement? I didn’t want to have callers immediately get the weather message with no greeting, and I didn’t want both the weather message and the IVR to give a greeting. So I pulled the greeting to the start, so it is given once only no matter what happens downstream.
If this is an insurmountable problem, I’ll just create another phone number, send it straight to a different IVR which has all-hidden codes, and promote it as a feature.
Ahh I understand now. So what I would do in that case is rather than use an announcement to play the initial greeting that doesn’t change, use an IVR that has just the company greeting in it with a hidden option to to access voicemail, then timeout immediately after the greeting to the CFC, then go to the full IVR.