“1 is not valid” response from Exchange 2010 Auto Attendant when key mappings are present

I had written a post about speech enabled and not enabled Exchange 2010 Auto Attendant prompts (http://terenceluk.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-speech-enabled-and-non-speech.html) but forgot to mention a critical “by design” behavior about key mappings and because I ran into this problem today, I thought it would be a good idea to write a short post about it.

Problem

You’ve created a newly auto attendant prompt that is not speech enabled with the following properties:

Speech IS NOT enabled.

Business hours key mappings are set.

A custom 10 second business hours greeting saying: “Thank you for calling us, press 1 for accounts payable, 2 for accounts receivable, 3….” is played.

You call into the auto attendant and hear the business hours greeting getting played and before it finishes, you hit option 1 for accounts payable because that’s what you want but you get the following reply from the auto attendant:

“1 is not valid”

You try doing the same for option 2 interrupting the prompt but you get the reply:

“2 is not valid”

Solution

The reason why you’re getting this reply from the auto attendant is because of the following:

Your prompt is not speech enabled and therefore you cannot interrupt the Business Hours Greeting.

The way around this is to actually put a blank wav or wma file for the Business Hours Greeting and use the custom recorded greeting for the Business Hours main menu prompt.

By doing so, the caller will be able to interrupt the auto attendant and not have to wait for it to finish in order to use the key mappings.