Auto Attendants: How Deep to Go, and When You Don't Need One

When a small office asks us for an auto attendant, we usually start by asking whether they need one. Most of them would be better off with a person picking up the phone. The auto attendant is included in your per-user fee either way, so we have no reason to talk you into one or out of one.

That surprises people, because the phone tree has become the thing you’re supposed to have. But we’ve got clients whose whole approach is that a human answers every call, and the system rings around the office until somebody does. That’s a deliberate choice and it works for them. If you’re in a service business, somebody answering on the second ring beats anything a menu can do for you.

So before you design a single menu, decide whether it should pick up before your people or after them.

Whether the Menu Should Answer First or Last

The setup we build most often in small offices works like this. A call comes in and rings a group of people. If nobody picks up inside a few rings, the auto attendant takes it and offers the menu. Callers who get a person never hear a menu at all. Callers who ring through at lunch get routed instead of getting voicemail.

Doing it the other way around means most callers hear a menu before they reach anybody. Somebody who knows an extension can dial straight through, and pressing zero should always work, but a first-time caller gets the menu. Direct extensions for the few customers who call you constantly are worth building either way.

There are businesses where the menu belongs up front. A call center needs one. So does an office with enough volume that a real person answering cold would just be a slower router. If you have several departments and each of them takes a steady stream of calls that have nothing to do with each other, put the menu first. For most small offices, it should sit behind the people.

How Many Menu Levels to Build

Your greeting, then one menu, then at most one more menu inside that. A fourth level should never happen.

The main greeting:

Thanks for calling Ridgeline Supply. For accounting, press 1. For sales, press 2. For service, press 3. To reach a person, press 0 or stay on the line.

The caller presses 1:

For accounts payable, press 1. For accounts receivable, press 2. For the CFO, press 3. To reach a person, press 0.

That’s the end of the road. If you go deeper than that, the fix is reorganizing who handles what rather than adding another menu.

Keep the options per menu short too. Somebody listening to a list of choices is holding them in their head while they wait to hear the one they want, and by option six they’ve lost the first three. If a menu needs more than five options, some of those options belong one level down, or they belong to a person.

Giving Every Caller a Way to Reach a Person

A phone tree fails when a caller lands somewhere with no way forward. A voicemail box nobody checks. A menu that repeats itself when the keypress doesn’t register. An extension that belonged to somebody who left two years ago.

Three things keep that from happening:

• Pressing zero reaches a person, or reaches the group most likely to have one. Callers try this whether you tell them to or not.
• Doing nothing routes somewhere. Plenty of people call from a cell phone in a car and never press anything. After the greeting plays twice, the call should go to a person or a monitored mailbox instead of hanging up.
• Every mailbox in the tree has an owner who gets an email when something lands in it. Voicemail to email is included in your plan.

Holiday and After-Hours Schedules

Your call flow needs to know when you’re closed. Otherwise the greeting says you’re open, the office is dark, and a caller sits through a menu to reach a phone nobody is next to.

We build your holiday and after-hours schedules, and we keep the standing ones current. The regular US holidays are covered by default and you don’t have to remember them.

The one-offs are where it goes wrong. The Friday you close for a long weekend, the day you shut down for inventory, the half days in the summer. We can’t know about those unless you tell us, and the call we get every holiday is somebody who meant to change their greeting for one of them and didn’t. If that happens, call us and an engineer sets it then, on the holiday itself if that’s when you noticed.

Spam Calls

If your plan is to have a person answer every call, you should know what that person is going to spend part of their day on. Spam volume is the thing we get the most complaints about lately, and nobody in this industry can honestly tell you they’ve solved it. Carrier-level filtering stops some of it. The rest reaches your phones.

That doesn’t change the advice. It does mean the person answering is now the one hanging up on robocalls, where a menu used to absorb some of that. Decide it on purpose rather than discover it in week two.

Recording the Greetings

Nobody enjoys this part when they have to do it themselves, which is why so many phone trees are still running a greeting somebody recorded into a handset in 2019 with the air conditioning on.

We produce the audio for you. You write the script and pick a voice. We generate the recording with AI, convert it to the format the system needs, and load it in. Changing it later means sending us new copy.

Keep the script short. Name the company, then get to the options. A caller who already knows why they called doesn’t want your hours or your website address first.

Changing Your Call Flow Later

Call flows change because businesses change. Somebody new starts, a department splits, you add a location, you decide the menu is annoying people.

Changes are part of your monthly fee. There’s no per-change charge and no separate professional services line for it. Two different things happen depending on what you’re asking for:

Small changes go in as a service ticket. A holiday message, rerouting somebody’s calls while they’re out, adding an extension for a new hire. You call or email, and an engineer picks it up during business hours.

Bigger changes get scheduled. Restructuring your menus means mapping out the new flow, getting your approval on it, and usually putting it live after hours so nobody is mid-call when it cuts over. That takes a conversation first.

If you have technical staff who want to make their own changes, we can set that up. Some of our clients hold their own credentials and edit their menus and greetings directly. That works when the person doing it understands what they’re looking at. The deal is you don’t leave us a mess to clean up. It’s case by case, and most clients never ask for it.

That’s what fully managed is supposed to mean. Ask any provider whether call flow changes come out of your monthly fee or out of a support budget.

Designing a Call Flow From Scratch

Sketch how you want calls handled before you look at a single menu. Decide who should answer first, what happens when they don’t, and where a caller ends up at 6pm, on the Fourth of July, and when they press nothing at all. Get that on paper and the menu almost builds itself.

If you’re switching providers, the rollout is when this gets designed. We build the auto attendants and the routing as part of the phone system setup.

Questions We Get About Auto Attendants

Want a second opinion on your call flow?

Tell us how calls come into your business today and we’ll tell you what we would change. If the answer is that you need fewer menus than you have, that’s what we’ll say.

Get Your Quote →   or call 844-767-1924