UM Auto Attendants | Planning for Unified Messaging

Using a UM auto attendant, you can create a voice-menu system that enables your callers to navigate through voice menus to locate or transfer calls to your UM-enabled users or departments. You can create and use your own voice prompts so that you're able to fully customize the UM auto attendant to your own needs.

The UM auto attendant uses a series of WAV files that callers hear instead of a human operator. The callers can navigate the menu system, place calls, or locate users using DTMF or voice inputs.

Note

You can join auto attendants together to form multi-level menus.

The UM auto attendant allows you to provide the following:

• Corporate or informational greetings, such as business hours or directions to a location
• Custom corporate menus that you can customize to have more than one level
• A directory search function that enables callers to search the organization's name directory
• The ability for callers to connect to the telephone of—or leave a message for—UM-enabled mailboxes

You are not limited in the number of UM auto attendants you can create, and each auto attendant can support an unlimited number of extensions. However, you should design menu systems for auto attendants carefully to ensure that the user has a positive experience. If you design them incorrectly, users can become very frustrated if the time it takes to connect correctly is lengthy or navigating the system is difficult. You should especially consider creating additional UM auto attendants if you are operating in a multi-language environment so that you can provide a dial-in number for each language.

When you create a UM auto attendant, you must provide the associated UM dial plan and extension number(s) to access the UM auto attendant. After creating the UM auto attendant, you can configure alternative greetings by specifying the WAV files to use. You also can configure different settings for work and non-work hours and features such as call transferring. You can create auto attendants in the EMC or by using the New-UMAutoAttendant cmdlet in the EMS.