Auto Attendant

Auto Attendant

In telephony or Unified Messaging environments, an automated attendant or auto attendant menu system transfers callers to the extension of a user or department without the intervention of a receptionist or an operator.

In many auto attendant systems, a receptionist or operator can be reached by pressing or saying zero. The automated attendant is a feature on most modern Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and Unified Messaging solutions.

In some auto attendant systems, there are message-only information menus and voice menus that are used so that an organization can provide business hours, directions to their premises, information about job opportunities, and answers to other frequently-asked questions. After the message plays, the caller is forwarded to the receptionist or operator or they can return to the main menu.

On more complex auto attendant systems, the menu system can be used to navigate to other auto attendant menus, locate a user in the system, or transfer to another outside telephone line. They can also be used to let the caller interact with the system in certain situations such as when a student enrolls for a college class or checks their grades or when you activate a credit card over the telephone.

Although auto attendants can be very useful, if they are not designed and configured correctly, they can confuse and frustrate callers. For example, specifically in larger organizations, when auto attendants are not designed correctly, callers can be led through an endless series of questions and menu prompts before they are finally transferred to a person to have their question answered.

Unified Messaging Auto Attendants

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging enables you to create one or more Unified Messaging auto attendants depending on the needs of your organization. Unified Messaging auto attendants can be used to create a voice menu system for an organization that lets external and internal callers navigate the Unified Messaging auto attendant menu system to locate and place or transfer calls to company users or departments in an organization.

When anonymous or unauthenticated users call an external business telephone number, or when internal callers call a defined extension number, they are presented with a series of voice prompts that help them place a call to a user, or locate a user in the organization and then place a call to that user. The Unified Messaging auto attendant is a series of voice prompts or .wav files that callers hear instead of a human operator when they call an organization that has Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging. The Unified Messaging auto attendant lets callers navigate the menu system, place calls, or locate users by using dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) or voice inputs. However, for automatic speech recognition (ASR) or voice inputs to be used, you must enable ASR on the Unified Messaging auto attendant.

In some companies (particularly in East Asia), office telephones may not have letters on the keys of the telephone. This makes the spell-the-name feature using the DTMF interface nearly impossible without a working knowledge of this mapping. By default, Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging uses E.161 key mapping. For example, 2=ABC, 3=DEF, 4=GHI, 5=JKL, 6=MNO, 7=PQRS, 8=TUV, 9=WXYZ. When inputting the combination of letters and numbers, for example "Mike1092", the numeric digits are mapped to themselves. For an e-mail alias of "Mike1092" to be entered correctly, the user will have to press the numbers 64531092. Also, for characters other than A-Z and 0-9 there will not be a telephone key equivalent and should not be entered. For example, the e-mail alias "mike.wilson" would be entered as 6453945766. Thus, there are 11 characters to be input, but only 10 digits will be entered by the user because the '.' character does not have a digit equivalent.

A Unified Messaging auto attendant has the following features:

• It provides corporate or informational greetings.
• It provides custom corporate menus. You can customize these menus to have more than one level.
• It provides a directory search function that enables a caller to search the organization's directory for a name.
• It enables a caller to connect to the telephone of, or leave a message for, members of the organization.

In the Active Directory directory service, each Unified Messaging auto attendant that is created is represented as an object. There is no limit to the number of Unified Messaging auto attendants that you can create in Active Directory. Each Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging auto attendant can support as many as 10 different customized extensions. A Unified Messaging auto attendant can reference one, and only one, Unified Messaging dial plan. However, Unified Messaging auto attendants can reference or link to other Unified Messaging auto attendants.

An incoming call that is received from an external telephone number or an internal telephone extension is processed by a Unified Messaging server and then sent to a Unified Messaging auto attendant that has been created. The Unified Messaging auto attendant is configured by the system administrator to use pre-recorded voice (*.wav) files that are then played over the telephone to the caller and let the caller navigate the Unified Messaging menu system. You can customize all the .wav files that are used when you configure a Unified Messaging auto attendant to meet the needs of your organization.

The following figure illustrates how you might use a single main number to access multiple auto attendants for different organizations or sub-organizations.

Figure: Using a single main number to access multiple auto attendants