Test Automation

Automated IVR Testing

Automated IVR testing replaces someone phoning the menu tree with stored test plans that run on a schedule. Each plan describes a path, the input to send at every step and the response expected back. Real calls run it, every step is checked, and failures escalate.

The point is not that a machine calls faster than a person. It is that a machine calls the paths nobody has time for, at hours nobody is awake for, after every change — and leaves a recording proving what happened.

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Automated IVR test plan running through each menu branch

The case

What manual IVR testing actually costs

Manual testing is not wrong, it is just bounded. These are the four boundaries, and they show up in that order as a menu tree grows.

It does not scale with the tree

Four options with four sub-options each is sixteen paths. Add a level and it is sixty-four. Nobody walks sixty-four paths by hand, so in practice only the first branch ever gets tested.

It only covers office hours

A manual test proves the IVR worked at 2pm on Tuesday. The after-hours tree, the holiday routing and the carrier maintenance window at 3am are all untested by definition.

It is skipped exactly when it matters

Testing is thorough on release day and skipped on the small change three weeks later. The small change is the one that breaks option 3.

It leaves no evidence

“I called it and it was fine” is not something you can put in front of an auditor, a customer or a post-incident review.

Automation does not replace the judgement in manual testing — deciding what is worth testing is still a human job. It replaces the repetition, and it covers the hours and the paths a person realistically never will.

Anatomy

What a test plan is made of

Six things. Once they are defined, the plan is a durable asset that runs unattended and can be copied to the next number.

The number to call

Any reachable phone number — toll-free, DID, landline or VoIP, in production or staging. No integration with your phone system is required, because the test arrives as an ordinary inbound call.

The sequence of steps

Wait for a prompt, send digit 2, wait, send digit 1, listen. Steps can send DTMF keypad tones or play recorded audio for speech-driven menus, so hybrid IVRs are one plan rather than two.

The expected result at each step

Each step declares what should come back. Anything else is a failure recorded against that specific step, which is what turns “the IVR is broken” into “option 3 stopped routing at 04:12”.

The schedule

When the plan runs and on which calendar, including holiday calendars that suppress tests against a line that is legitimately closed.

The retry policy

How many recalls run before anything escalates, so a transient carrier fault does not raise an incident.

Who gets told

Ordered alert groups and ordered devices within them — phone, SMS, email, webhook — so escalation matches your on-call rota rather than spamming everyone at once.

Not sure which paths to cover first? Theeight scenarios worth writing are the failures that actually happen in production.

Regression coverage after every change

Most IVR incidents are edits, not outages. A new option inserted into the main menu shifts every option below it. A re-recorded greeting announces the wrong hours. A queue is renamed and one branch quietly stops resolving. Every internal metric stays green throughout.

Because a test plan is a stored sequence, your regression suite is simply the plans you already run. After a change you either wait for the next scheduled run or trigger one immediately, and within a minute you know whether the paths that worked yesterday still work.

The same applies to migrations, which is where this earns its keep most obviously. Moving from an on-premise PBX to a cloud contact centre, or porting numbers between carriers, is exactly when a path silently stops working and nobody notices for a week. Run the suite against the old and new numbers through cutover and the divergence shows up the same day.

API and webhooks

Test results do not have to live in a dashboard nobody opens. A read API exposes plan status as JSON, and webhooks push failures out the moment they happen.

Pull the current status of every active plan into your own dashboard
Query a specific plan by ID after a deployment to confirm it still passes
Filter plans by status to find everything currently failing
Receive a webhook POST the moment a plan fails, with values from the failed run substituted into the payload
Open an incident automatically in PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Slack or an internal system

API access and data export are Premium Plan features. SeeAPI integration for the endpoint reference.

What this does not do

Worth being direct, because “IVR testing” gets used for two different disciplines and buying the wrong one wastes a quarter.

Phone Number Monitoring does functional testing, not load testing. It verifies that paths behave correctly — that option 3 reaches billing, that the prompt is current, that the line answers at all. It does not simulate hundreds of concurrent callers to find the point at which your contact centre degrades. Concurrency is deliberately capped per account so that monitoring traffic stays light on your systems, which is the opposite of what a load generator is for.

If your question is “does my IVR still work?”, this is the right category. If your question is “what happens to my IVR at 500 simultaneous calls?”, you need a load testing tool, and it will be a different product.

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What automated IVR testing costs

Published on the site. You can work out the bill before talking to anyone.

The plan

Automated menu-tree navigation with DTMF is a Premium Plan feature — from$199.99 per month for up to 5 lines, scaling to $1,108.46 for 100 lines. Premium also carries hold-time tracking, audio quality testing, data export and API access.

Basic Monitoring, from $9.99 per month, automates reachability checks only. It will tell you the number stopped answering. It will not tell you option 3 started routing to the wrong queue.

Full pricing reference

A worked example

A regression suite of four plans covering the four main branches of one IVR, run twice a day, each taking about two minutes of call time.

Premium Plan, 5 lines: $199.99 / mo
4 plans × 2 runs/day × 30 days: 240 calls
~3 credits each: ~720 credits
Roughly: $252 / mo

Using the 1,000-credit package at $0.072 per credit. On Premium, credits cover placing the call plus hold time at 1 credit per minute times the destination factor — hence roughly 3 per two-minute walk. US and Canada calls cost 1 credit; international 1 to 6. Credits do not expire while the plan is active.

Accounts above 300 credits a month need authorisation first, so a suite at this volume starts with a short conversation.

Related capabilities

IVR testing

What to test, the scenarios worth covering, and how a test call works.

IVR monitoring

The same checks run continuously against production, with escalation.

Voice recognition

Assert on the words a caller hears, not just the routing.

API and webhooks

Pull plan status as JSON, or push failures into your own alerting.

Frequently asked questions

What is automated IVR testing?

Automated IVR testing replaces a person manually phoning a menu tree with stored test plans that run on a schedule. Each plan describes a path through the IVR, the input to send at each step and the response expected back. The system places real calls, checks each step and raises an alert when a path stops behaving.

Do I need to integrate with my phone system?

No. Tests arrive as ordinary inbound calls over the carrier network, so anything reachable on a phone number can be tested without agents, SDKs or access to your PBX or contact centre platform. That is also why the tests catch carrier and DID faults that internal tooling cannot see.

Can I trigger a test run from CI or after a deployment?

Plans run on their schedule, and you can also run one on demand from the dashboard. The read API lets an external system poll a plan by ID to confirm it is passing after a change, which covers most post-deployment checks. There is no documented endpoint for triggering a run from CI — if that is a hard requirement, raise it with support rather than assuming it.

How does this handle speech-driven menus?

Steps can play recorded audio as well as send DTMF tones, and voice recognition can assert that the prompt a caller hears contains the words it should. A menu that accepts both keypad and speech input is covered by one plan.

Does it do load or stress testing?

No. Phone Number Monitoring places scheduled functional test calls — it verifies that paths behave correctly, not that your IVR survives hundreds of concurrent callers. Concurrency is deliberately capped per account so monitoring traffic stays light. Load testing is a separate discipline and needs a separate tool.

Which plan includes it?

Automated navigation of IVR menu trees with DTMF is a Premium Plan feature, from $199.99 per month for up to 5 lines. Basic Monitoring, from $9.99, automates reachability checks but does not walk menu trees.

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