VICIdial IVR Setup: Inbound Call Routing & Auto-Attendant

Customers call your number. They hear silence for three seconds, then a robot voice says "please hold," then they wait in a queue for four minutes while a distorted MP3 loops, then they hang up. Your abandonment rate is 40% and your agents are asking why the phone never rings. Meanwhile, the guy who set up your IVR two years ago no longer works here and nobody knows which call menu routes where. This is the VICIdial IVR guide that fixes all of that. VICIdial's IVR system is built around a feature called Call Menus — the admin-level configuration that controls what callers hear, which DTMF key presses route where, and how calls flow from a DID to an agent's headset. It's powerful, flexible, and — if you've never set one up before — surprisingly unintuitive. The admin GUI gives you a blank form with 20+ fields, no tooltips, and documentation that assumes you already know how IVR routing works. We've built IVR systems on VICIdial for everything from 3-option auto-attendants to 6-level-dee