A phone menu makes a two-person business sound organised. Build too much of one and the same business sounds like a call centre. Here is what a short menu should do, and when you are better off without one.
Disclosure: AldoMedia is a paid affiliate of Unitel Voice. If you sign up through a link on this page we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. We only recommend what we would set up for our own clients, and we say plainly below who should not buy this.
An auto attendant is the recorded voice that answers your business number and gives the caller a short list of choices. Press 1 for sales, press 2 for service, stay on the line for a person. It is sometimes called a phone menu, a virtual receptionist or an IVR. They are the same idea with different labels on the box.
It is worth being blunt about what it is not. It is not a receptionist, because it cannot answer a question. It is not an answering service, because there is nobody behind it taking messages. It is a signpost. It listens for one keypress and sends the call somewhere, and that is the whole job.
An extension is a short number that belongs to a person or a department. Dial it from inside the business, or press it from the menu, and the right phone rings. On an older office system that extension was a physical wire running to a physical desk, which is why extensions used to mean a building full of people.
On an internet based phone system, an extension is a label attached to a person. It follows them to whatever they answer calls on. That single change is what lets three people in three different places sit behind one business number, and it is the part of this product that small businesses get the most out of.
So there are two purchases hiding under one name. The menu is optional. The extensions, the greetings and the routing behind the menu are the parts almost every business uses, whether or not a caller is ever asked to press anything.
A caller is holding a phone with a question in their head. Everything your greeting says before they can act on that question is a delay they did not ask for. A good menu is therefore short, obvious and honest about how to reach a person.
| The decision | Version that works | Version that loses the call |
|---|---|---|
| Opening words | The business name, then the options | Fifteen seconds about your commitment to quality |
| Number of options | Two or three | Six, read slowly, then a submenu |
| Reaching a person | Stated on the first pass | Never mentioned, or buried in option four |
| Where an option goes | A phone somebody actually answers | A mailbox nobody has checked since spring |
| Wrong key, or no key | Falls through to a person or a mailbox | Repeats the menu, then hangs up |
| After the beep | The caller knows when they will hear back | Silence, so they call your competitor to be safe |
Nobody complains about a phone menu. They just stop being your customer, quietly, and you never find out it happened. Three things go wrong most often.
The caller hangs up and dials the next business on the list, because they are standing in a flooded basement and are not in the mood to choose a department. Or they press whatever key they half remember, reach the wrong extension, leave a message there, and conclude a week later that you ignored them. Or they press zero out of pure habit, get nothing, and decide you are bigger and less interested than you are.
If you take urgent work, the fastest route to a human should be the first thing the caller hears, not the last.
Most systems let you record more than one greeting and switch between them on a schedule. In practice a small business needs three: open, closed, and closed for a holiday or a week off.
A voice with a local accent that clearly belongs to the business beats a polished stock recording for almost every company on this site. Stand in a quiet room, hold the phone normally, and read a sentence you would actually say. If you record it in the truck with the engine running, callers hear the truck.
Write it down first. Speaking off the top of your head produces a greeting twice as long as it needs to be, and you will have to record it again anyway.
Most missed opportunities arrive outside business hours, and most after-hours greetings waste them. A message that says only that the office is now closed leaves somebody holding a problem with nowhere to put it. Say three things instead:
Then test it. Call your own business number from a mobile at nine in the evening, listen to the whole thing without skipping, leave a message, and check that the message arrives where you expect. Do the same on a Saturday. A greeting nobody has tested since the day it was recorded is the single most common fault we find on small business phone systems.
This is where the product earns its money for a small team. One published business number, several people, no shared knowledge of who is where. A customer calls the number they have always called. It reaches whoever handles that kind of call, at a kitchen table in one town or a job site in another.
Four questions decide whether a given system will actually do that for you. Ask them before you sign up rather than afterwards.
Feature names differ between providers and between plans, so ask about the behaviour you want rather than the term you read somewhere.
Tell the caller who they are going to before you transfer them. Announcing the name makes a small business sound like a company that knows what it is doing, and it saves the caller from repeating the whole story to a stranger.
Have each person record their own voicemail greeting, in their own voice, with their own name. Default mailbox greetings that read out a string of digits are the fastest way to make a real business sound abandoned.
This one has a real no attached, and the no is common. If the same person answers every call no matter which option gets pressed, the menu is pure friction. It adds a decision, twenty seconds and a small insult to a call that was going to reach the right person anyway.
Sounding bigger than you are is not free. A caller who wanted a plumber and got a switchboard learns that you are busy, that you have layers, and that reaching you is a project. Plenty of businesses win work precisely because the owner picks up.
Note the middle two on the right. Both are about call volume, not about image. That is the honest test: build the menu when the phone is busy enough that answering it well is a problem, not when you want to sound like a bigger company.
Start smaller than you think, because it is easy to add an option later and awkward to admit that the one you recorded goes nowhere.
Names, not departments. If the list has one name on it, you have your answer about the menu already.
A destination is a person or group who reliably picks up and knows what to do. Everything else is a mailbox, and mailboxes do not need their own option.
Read it out loud. If you run out of breath or interest, it is too long.
Callers on old handsets, callers driving, callers who did not hear. Every one of them should end up somewhere sensible rather than back at the beginning.
Once during business hours and once late at night, from a mobile, pressing every option including the wrong ones.
Look again after a month. Most systems can tell you which options callers chose. A menu gets better by getting shorter.
AldoMedia has built and looked after websites, email and phones for Western New York businesses since 1999, so we have heard a lot of phone menus from the customer's side of the call. We are a paid affiliate of Unitel Voice rather than the operator of the service, and we will tell you when a menu would only slow your callers down. Tell us how your calls arrive today and who answers them, or start with the support pages.
It is the recorded voice that answers your business number and offers the caller a short list of choices, such as press 1 for sales or press 2 for service. It is a signpost, not a receptionist. It listens for one keypress and sends the call to an extension, a group of phones or a mailbox. It cannot answer a question, and it cannot make anybody available who is not.
Usually not. If the same person answers every call whichever option the caller presses, the menu is pure friction: it adds twenty seconds and a decision to a call that was going to reach the right person anyway. Extensions, a good voicemail greeting and an after-hours message are the parts a very small business actually benefits from.
Three at most, and two is often better. People hold about three choices in their head while listening. Read out a fourth and a fifth and most callers stop listening, press whatever they remember, or hang up. If you have more departments than that, group them and let the person who answers transfer the call.
They should be able to, and the menu should say so out loud on the first pass. Offer a stated way through to a human, and make a wrong key or no key at all fall through to the same place rather than repeating the menu or hanging up. A caller who presses 0 out of habit is telling you they want a person.
No. On an internet based phone system an extension is a label attached to a person rather than a wire running to a desk. Three people working from three different places can sit behind one business number, each with their own extension, and callers never learn where anybody is. Check with the provider how an extension reaches somebody on a mobile, and what happens when nobody answers.
Three things: that you are closed, when you open again, and what the caller should do right now. A message that says only that the office is closed leaves somebody holding a problem with nowhere to put it. Give them a mailbox, a website address for booking, or an option that rings a mobile if you genuinely take emergency work.
The other half of how customers reach you, on a domain the business owns.
Read the business email guideA message that never arrives costs you the same enquiry a bad menu does.
Why mail lands in spamHow to reach us, what we look after, and where to start when something breaks.
Go to supportNot sure whether a menu suits how your calls arrive? Ask us, or browse all of the guides.
Two or three options, a stated way to a person, and an after-hours greeting that tells the caller what to do. If one person answers every call at your business, we will tell you to skip the menu entirely.
