Enterprise Alert is capable of alerting users reliably via phone calls and users can then acknowledge or decline the alerts during the call by simply pressing a certain key on the phone. But sometimes it happens that you miss the correct key or the phone interprets the input wrongly. One example could be an on-call user that gets an alert call in the middle of the night and while not quite awake he tries to press key “1” but then he accidentally hits key “2” because these keys are too close to each other. In this case he will decline instead of accept the alert and the on-call backup would be alerted instead. The smaller the phone and keypad (including touch screens) are, the more likely it gets to miss the right button especially in stressful situations.

By default the following keys are used:

Key 1: Acknowledge the alert

Key 2: Decline the alert

Key 3: Go back to the main menu

Thanks to the highly adaptive design of Enterprise Alert and the corresponding modules you can change that to a more “fat-finger-friendly” pattern with relatively low effort. For changing the default keys, you will have to edit the responsible VoiceXML files called “FeedbackRequired.xml”. These files are located in sub-folders named after the notification types User, Escalation and Broadcast in the directory “…\Enterprise Alert\voiceXML”.

Please open each file and search for the following section:

<choice dtmf=”1″ next=”#onAcceptForm”></choice>

<choice dtmf=”2″ next=”#onDeclineForm”></choice>

<choice dtmf=”3″ next=”#formMain”></choice>

Here you can see the default DTMF tones associated to accept an alert, decline it or to go back to the main menu. In order to change the key for declining an alert from “2” to “0” you will have to edit the according DTMF parameter and the result will look as follows.

<choice dtmf=”1″ next=”#onAcceptForm”></choice>
<choice dtmf=”0″ next=”#onDeclineForm”></choice>
<choice dtmf=”3″ next=”#formMain”></choice>

This concludes the necessary configuration and the final step now is to apply the changes by restarting the Windows service “Enterprise Alert VoIP Module”.