Fonality - Call Menu Example #3: Skills Based Routing from Main Menu

Fonality customers who provide multi-lingual services to their own callers have a definite need to route callers away from the Main menu into an appropriate submenu based on the caller's native language. It is very common in Los Angeles for a company to greet callers with a message such as "Thank you for calling Company ABC, for English, press 1, for Spanish, press 2" (only of course the Spanish part is spoken in Spanish).

This "skills-based routing" main menu is very easy to setup in your  PBXtra .

Create a sub-menu

The first thing we should always do is consider the final destination of the caller. With our skills-based routing example, we know the caller's first choice will be that of a preferred language. Therefore we need to create submenus to handle all the languages we offer in our voice prompt.

Open

1. Click on AutoAnswer

2. Click on sub-menus

3. In the Add New Submenu box, enter the name of your sub-menu

4. Click Create New Submenu

Next we need to add steps into our sub-menu. A simple example would be playing a voice prompt offering callers additional options like:

For Billing - press 1
For Sales - press 2
For Support - press 3

Where all these prompts are rendered in the caller's chosen language. Once the caller makes a selection, we may forward them to a Queue, or perhaps just a single extension using the Keypress functionality of the system.

Here is a completed submenu for callers who speak Japanese:

Open

In the image above, you can see that we have a very simple Japanese language submenu. The caller hears the same voice prompt three times with short pauses in between to allow the caller ample time to make a choice. The keypress options configured only apply to this particular submenu.
Many of the keypress options presented are an extension. Therefore, this submenu represents the final destination for the caller: a live person.

Let's look at the other English language menu:

Open

This English language submenu is nearly identical to our Japanese language submenu, but the keypress options have been mapped to other extensions. Both possible end-points for a caller have been configured at this point.

Now we return to configuring the main menu:

Open

Our main menu is configured to play a voice prompt and offers the caller three choices: English, Japanese, or the Operator.

Once you complete configuration for your skills-based IVR, the configuration is immediately applied to your system, and inbound callers will hear your main greeting offering two languages.