You no longer need to spend time answering the same questions over and over. Your callers can select the information they want to hear without waiting. This is known as Voice-On-Demand.
You can record up to 99 informational messages by using any of the 99 greetings in the VoicePro. Then you assign the greetings to various menu options. Your main greeting will instruct your caller to press the appropriate keys to hear the information they need.
Answer Common Questions Automatically
You can make announcements to answer common questions, such as descriptions of your products, details of your latest promotions, announcements about your community events, or directions to your office.
These greetings are different from voice mail greetings. They are used only for announcements. The VoicePro also has 99 mailboxes that have their own greetings.
The difference is important to understand:
- Play information only: When you just need to play a message to your caller, and you don't need to have them reply or to leave a message for you, then use the informational Voice-On-Demand greetings. These greetings just play the recorded announcement and then wait for the caller to select another menu item.
- Play information and take a message: If you want to allow your caller to leave a message after listening to your information, then record your message as a greeting of a Voice Mail box.
Let's discuss how you would use both cases:
1. Play Announcements only -- and return to menu
If you just want to allow the caller to listen to a recorded announcement and then go back to the main menu, you would use one of the announcement greetings, not mailbox greetings. Announcement Greetings can be recorded with Function 25 and assigned as menu selections with Function 44.
Note that this is the same way that you can record your company greetings for day, night or weekend. But there we are using the greetings for various informational announcements. After we create them, we also need to assign each one to a specific menu option. That's the key you want the caller to press in order to select the proper announcement message.
Say you want your caller to press 5 to get directions to your office. You would record a greeting using Function 25 discussing the way to drive to your office.
Let's use greeting number 5 (just to be consistent). Then with Function 44 you would assign menu option 5 to play greeting number 5.
At any time during the playback, your caller can select another option. There is no need to wait for a recording to finish. Callers can dial extensions if they want to talk to someone or they can select another menu option from the mail menu.
The caller will be in the mail menu after the greeting finishes. So you should also include some menu prompts at the end of each announcement message, probably the same prompts you used in the main greeting. Otherwise the caller will hear dead air and not know what's happening.
2. Play Announcement and take a message
If you want to let the caller leave a message after listening to an announcement, then use a voice mailbox instead.
In that case you would record your announcement in the greeting of one of the mailboxes. Then you would use Function 44 to assign the desired menu option to use that mailbox.
Function 44 is used to assign menu keys to any of three things. We already discussed assigning to announcement greetings. Here we just mentioned assigning a key to a mailbox. You can also assign a key to transfer to an extension. But that's another subject.
In the case of using mailboxes, when the caller presses the key you assigned, it will play the greeting in the assigned mailbox and then it will take a message into that mailbox.
If you have message notification enabled for that mailbox, you will be notified about the message the caller had left.
