Support Portal

Overview

Use Setting up an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for your CCPro SmartPBX instance is straight forward and feature-rich, with many configuration options available through the User Interface.

This guide will take you through setting up a basic IVR, or Menu as it is known, as well as some extra configuration options. 

This guide assumes you have gone through basic SmartPBX setup steps and have configured a main number already, as we will be using that main number for our IVR in this case.

Login URL is https://portal.pbx.ccprosolutions.uk 

Applications You Will Use

SmartPBX Configuration

We begin with the assumption that you have configured your company (in our example, “Doctor’s Office”) with users which reflect both individuals and particular “shared destinations”, like the following example setup:

Jane Doe here is simply the account administrative user with control of all of these functions and configurations. 

If the IVR/menu will represent the main path for inbound calls, select the Virtual Receptionist option as such:

This flow assumes you are setting up a menu for “open hours” when our hypothetical “Doctor’s Office” might be actively taking calls. Here in the Virtual Receptionist configuration page, as linked to in the above menu area, we note our configurations for the different menus in each language, which we will configure in the next steps: 

In the above example, we’ve optionally set a * option to play the main menu again, a typical configuration for many IVRs/menus, just as an example. Here you can also confirm that you have the right media file configured for this menu, as seen on the right of the above screenshot.

Also note in this area that there are many possible configurations for each DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) digit available in the IVR, as seen here: 

The English and Spanish menus as seen above will be created in the following section, where we will use Advanced Callflows to complete our “Doctor’s Office” menu setup. 

Advanced Configuration Options Using Advanced Callflows 

Now we will explore some more complex configurations. The following scenario involves a bilingual (English and Spanish)set of menu options and different destination routing. 

To accomplish this, we will need to expand our activities into the Advanced Callflows application. When we open Callflows in CCPro SmartPBX, we can navigate to the Menu configuration area, here:

Here you will find more in-depth configuration options for each menu you create in SmartPBX (and here in Advanced Callflows as well). 

To begin in this area, let’s configure the default Main Open Hours Menu, which is already created when you first open SmartPBX.  

First, select it from the menu on the left:

The only change we’ll be making for now to this particular menu to update the media file to be played when a caller reaches the main menu during business hours:

Next, we will need to create new Menus for the English and Spanish menus, respectively, so we will “return to Callflows Home”, and select Menu from the main area:

And configure the menu appropriately, as in the example below:

As before, be sure to edit the Greeting Message to reflect the correct recording for the English menu in the “Edit” section for the Greeting Message row:

For the purposes of this guide, we will be using the default values found in the other sections of the menu editing area. 

Next, we will create separate callflows to represent the individual English and Spanish menus. Return to the main Callflows Home section and select the “Callflows” option as seen here:

 Create a new Callflow:

 Here we create a callflow for the English menu, for example: 

You will need to repeat this process for the Spanish menu as well. This callflow logic assumes the individuals attending the phones are bilingual and the menu instructions are for the benefit of the caller’s navigation alone. 

Be sure to edit the callflow name details, and especially make sure to list the callflow in the Main Number section of SmartPBX, like so:

And this point, based on your configurations in SmartPBX, you should have a functioning IVR or menu with two sub-menus, one for English and one for Spanish.

Best Practices

Menu Options

Users should, because calls to this type of endpoint follow the user callflow specifically, better than devices in the sense because fewer options on device configurations (i.e. less complete callflow, no automatic voicemail overflow, etc.).

No issue with cascading menus (be sure to not create a loop of some kind, always have a final destination.

Users in this menu: outgoing can always use account CID; for inbound, as long as you have a SmartPBX user created, set in SmartPBX, or configured on the number itself.

For emails, best practices, each user should have a valid email address - in SmartPBX, under voicemails, any account will have a main voicemail box on creation, VM box 0; clicking on wrench will show a recipients options where you can designate recipients for the main VM box. 

Text To Speech: Advanced Callflows

There’s the option under Play Media to create Text To Speech.