Get a Five9 IVR ready for the next holiday

1. The holiday dates in the script

A Five9 IVR script usually decides "are we closed today?" by comparing today's date with a list of dates, in an If/Else or Case module. Those dates are fixed values in the script, so once a holiday passes, last year's date stays there until someone changes it. Five9 reads the date in the campaign's time zone.

By hand: open the script in Five9's IVR Script Designer, find every module that compares the date, change each date, and save.

With ivrloom: the editor's 🕒 Hours dialog lists every holiday date a script checks, flags dates that have passed, and charts business hours. On paid plans, Roll passed dates forward… moves them to next year's date in one reviewed step — shifting a federal holiday that falls on a weekend to the weekday it is observed — and leaves dates it cannot match for you to check. On any plan you can change each date in its module's properties.

2. The greeting, in the format Five9 takes

Five9 takes prompt audio only as WAV, G.711 µ-law, mono, 8 kHz. A greeting recorded on a phone or delivered by a voice-over artist as MP3 or 44.1 kHz WAV has to be converted first, or Five9 refuses it.

By hand: convert the file (Audacity, or sox greeting.mp3 -r 8000 -c 1 -e u-law greeting.wav), then upload it in Five9's prompt settings — as a new prompt, or over the existing greeting.

With ivrloom: the free prompt audio converter does the conversion in your browser, without an account and without uploading anything, and lets you hear the result as callers will. With Five9 connected mode (beta), Replace audio… converts the file and puts it into the existing prompt in one step, after you type the prompt's name to confirm. Callers hear it at once. Five9 keeps no earlier version and its API cannot read the current audio out, so keep your own copy of last year's file.

3. Publish the script

By hand: save the script in the IVR Script Designer — a saved script is live straight away — or re-import an edited export.

With ivrloom: download the edited bundle and re-import it in Five9, or, with connected mode, Save to Five9, which first warns you if someone changed the script in Five9 since you opened it.

All three in one checklist

The 🕒 Hours dialog in the ivrloom editor puts the steps in one list for the script you have open: are the holiday dates up to date, which prompts the flow plays (the ones that look like greetings first), and is the script published. With connected mode each step has its button; without it, the list points to the converter and the export. ivrloom cannot tell for certain which prompt plays only on holidays, so it lists the flow's prompts and lets you choose.

ivrloom is an independent product, not affiliated with Five9, Inc.