The difference between Auto Attendant and I.V.R.

“What phone system features are must-haves, for your company?” I say to a customer interested in getting quotes for hosted VoIP.

“Voicemail to email, call transfer and IVR” the customer says.

Hearing “IVR” I immediately stop. “This customer must be doing some advance stuff on their phone system!” I think to myself.

“Tell me about how your company needs calls to flow through the IVR?” I ask.

“Well, we just need a general greeting, offering options, like ‘sales, service, and a few others.’ We also need the ability to dial by extension” the customer answers.

“Not IVR… this is just an auto attendant” I think to myself.

This back-and-forth happens often, so I thought it might be helpful to explain the difference between an IVR feature and an auto attendant feature.

Auto Attendant

An auto attendant is a static message, which is automatically played to an incoming caller (i.e. “Press 1 for sales, 2 for company directory, or 3 to repeat this message”). It might be one message or several messages, branching off one another. It might ask you to press buttons or speak into the phone.

The key thing to remember is an auto attendant is static.

IVR

I.V.R. (IVR), stands for “Interactive Voice Response.” If you’re like me, when you hear the word “Voice” you typically think it’s referring to someone having the ability to “speak” their commands into the phone, to instruct the system where you want to be routed. But that’s not true.

The “Voice” is referring to the auto attendant’s voice, “interacting” with you, dynamically.

The key differentiator between an IVR and an auto attendant is an IVR is not static. It’s interactive, asking you a question, then collecting your response into a database, or feeding you information (from a database), based on your answer. An IVR is interacting between the caller and a dynamic database.

For instance, when you call your bank and enter your account information, the system is pulling your most recent account balance from a dynamic, ever-changing database and speaking it back to you.

Another example is a telephone survey which asks you questions and records your answers, which will later be pulled from the database and used for another purpose.

So, I hope that cleared up some confusion. As always, feel free to email me with your questions!

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About the Author
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.