Learn how to set up an Auto Attendant and make your receptionist eternally grateful

Auto Attendants can be very useful in helping to route incoming calls to an organisation. If you have a very busy reception an auto attendant can help restore some sanity and allow them to give personal attention to those people that need it instead of just routing calls all day.

It would probably be useful to have different auto attendants set up at different times of the day. At the very least you would probably want an office hours auto attendant and one for out of hours service where you might simply offer callers the option to leave a voicemail. And you could route the voicemails to separate departments rather than just collecting them all in one main voicemail box.

Don’t just restrict the auto attendant to the front door of the organisation. It can also be used in other areas where you might have external callers dial a number and then want to give them options of who they want to speak to or even get put through to a voicemail or hear a recorded message.

Now we’ve considered the benefits of an auto attendant let’s get down to the business of how to configure it on the Avaya IP Office 500 system.

There are 4 elements to setting up an Auto Attendant:-

Incoming Call Route

Time Profile

Auto Attendant

Message recording

You need to take a little time at this stage to plan how you want the auto attendant to work. You will need someone to record the message. You will need to know what options you are going to give callers. You will need to know which External number you want to apply the auto attendant to. You will need to need to think about what times you want the auto attendant to be active on the system. You may need to have at least two auto attendants set up but here I’ll talk you through configuring one.....the others are going to be easy!

Once you’ve done your planning we’ll jump straight in and get the first part of the configuration set up.....

Time Profile

Let’s first of all set up a time profile for when we want the auto attendant to be active. You will see the Time Profile option in the left hand column. Right Click and create a new one. You can add a specific date using the Add Date button. But in this example we will click on the Add Recurring button to set up an office hours time profile for 8.00 am to 5.00 pm Monday to Friday.

Make sure you OK these changes.

Autoattendant

Next we need to set up the Auto Attendant. Open up the Avaya IP Office System Administrator and right click on Auto Attendant in the left hand column. Select New and give it a name. Most of the settings will be fine with the defaults. We’ll set up a Where it says Menu Options click into the Recording Name drop down box and type in a name for the recording. You will notice next to this is a box called Shortcode and the number will be automatically generated for you by the system. This is the code that you need to dial on a handset to record the new Auto Attendant message so make a note of it.

Now go to the other Tab on this screen named Actions. This is where you set up what happens when a caller presses a key. For instance press 1 for reception, press 2 for marketing.

Click onto the Key you want to assign and then click on the Edit button to set it up. You will notice the Edit Action box. Select the Action you want to happen when a caller presses that Key. In most cases this is probably going to be a transfer. Then Select the Destination and choose the user that you want to transfer the call to from the list in your directory.

Message recording

There’s not much more to set up before we apply this auto attendant to a phone number but before we do this you will want to get the message recorded. Remember the shortcode that you made a note of earlier when configuring the Auto Attendant. Get the person who is going to record the message to dial this number and set up the greeting.

All that’s left to do now is to point an incoming number at the auto attendant.

Incoming Call Route

Go to the Incoming Call Routes and click on the Destinations tab. You will see the TimeProfile Column. This is where we would choose the Time Profile we set up earlier. Although we configure this we are not going to use it this time as there is already one defined called Default Value, but at least you know how to set up Time Profiles if you want to have different Auto Attendants operating at different times.

Now click on the Destination drop down box and choose the Auto Attendant you created earlier. OK this change and save the configuration. Choose to Merge the changes and you’re done.

You can easily create additional auto attendants for different times of the day or for different incoming call routes.