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ItalyOne number on your sign, four teams behind it.
A phone menu asks the caller one thing, which department they are calling for, and sends the call where it needs to go right away. No transferring, no explaining the question a second time, and no colleague answering the phone for something they can do nothing with.
A call through the menu
“Welcome to Reynolds & Co. For sales press 1, for support 2, for accounting 3.”
- 1 Sales team · 4 phones
- 2 Support queue
- 3 Accounting mobile number
- — Nothing pressed back to the start
Every option points to a destination: a team, a queue, a number, a voicemail or another menu. Anyone who presses nothing hears the menu once more and then reaches the destination you have set as the fallback.
Transferring is the most expensive part of a call
Not because it takes long, but because it happens twice: the caller explains their question to someone who can’t help with it, and then again to someone who can. Meanwhile, two people are busy with one call.
The wrong people get interrupted
Whoever happens to answer is the one who gets interrupted, usually someone it doesn’t concern. With a few calls a day that goes unnoticed; with thirty it is half a day of attention that nobody gets back.
The caller says it twice
And the second time shorter and more irritated than the first. That is the moment when a call that started well turns difficult after all, before anyone has even gotten to the actual question.
You don't know where the volume is
Without a menu, everything arrives in one pile. With a menu you see how many people press 1 and how many press 2, and so which team falls over first when it gets busier.
Four steps, and we do the first three
A menu is not a setting but a call flow, and we build it for you. What you do yourself afterward is change the destinations behind it, which you do from your dashboard, just like the rest of your routing.
- Step 1
You send us the options
Which choices you want to offer and where each one should go. Three or four is almost always enough.
- Step 2
The text becomes a voice
You type the prompt and choose a voice in the text-to-speech assistant. Recording it yourself or hiring a voice actor works too.
- Step 3
We build the flow
We program the menu, the fallback and the transfers, and put it live on your number.
- After that
You change the destinations
A team that changes, a number that needs to be different: you do that yourself and it applies immediately, even to the call that is coming in at that moment.
The same menu, a different input method
We also sell a virtual receptionist, and it does exactly this, except that the caller says “support” instead of pressing 2. The same list, the same destinations, the same predictability. Which one you choose depends on your callers, not on which is newer.
Press
The caller presses a number. There is nothing to mishear.
- Works with background noise
- Works for callers who can’t or would rather not speak
- Works in every language and accent
- Does require someone to remember the options
Speak
The caller says what they are calling about. No hunting for the keypad in the car.
- Nobody has to remember a number
- Also suits longer lists
- Can be misheard, so a fallback is essential
- You choose the recognition language
Four choices decide whether your menu works
The technology is the easy part. These four decide whether a caller gets through smoothly or gives up.
How many options you offer
Three or four. With five or more, the first option is forgotten before the last one has been read out, and people just press anything.
If you have more departments than options, group them and only split them up in a submenu.
The order they come in
The most chosen option first. That spares most callers from listening to the rest, and it is the only change you can make without a new script.
After a month, your statistics show whether your order matches reality.
What each option leads to
A team, a queue, a mobile number, a voicemail or another menu. An option that points to an empty line is worse than no option at all.
Put something behind every option that is guaranteed to answer, in the evening too.
What happens when nothing is pressed
A landline, a queue or the menu one more time. This is the setting where most callers disappear, and the only one nobody tests.
Call your own number and press nothing. That is the whole test.
Part of Customer Service
The phone menu comes at no extra cost with Customer Service, for up to eight people at €49 a month. It makes no difference whether you choose a simple menu with two options or an extensive, multilingual setup with several levels. To find out exactly what an IVR is, read IVR systems explained.
The feature works on all of our phone numbers, so you never have to choose between functionality and reach.
About the phone menu
Technically more than you should want. In practice three or four, with submenus underneath if you really need more. A menu that someone has to sit through costs you the caller you were trying to help.
That depends on what you change. You move the destinations behind the options yourself, in real time: if a colleague is out sick or a number needs to be different today, you handle it in your dashboard and it applies right away. If you want to change the menu itself (an extra option, a different order, new wording), we rebuild it, and it is live the next business day.
Yes. The menu belongs to the number, not to the country. You can put a different menu in a different language on each number, with the same teams or different ones behind the options.
The menu one more time, and then whatever you have set as the fallback. Never let that be a dead end: people also call from landlines where key presses don’t always come through.
Yes. A voicebot is a destination like a team or a queue, so you could, for example, send option 3 to a bot that takes orders and the rest to people.
You send us the menu options you want and tell us where each option should route to. We then program the complete menu and switch it on for your number.
Most customers create the prompt with our text-to-speech assistant: you type the text, choose a voice and the recording is ready right away. If you would rather use your own voice, you can record the message yourself and send us the audio file.
Yes, menus can be nested without limit. A common setup is a language menu followed by a department menu, and there is no maximum to the number of levels you can use.
Yes, each option can be linked to a phone number, queue, voicemail, recorded message, webhook or another menu. That way you build exactly the call flow that fits the way your business works.
Yes, that is a common setup. You can let callers choose their language first (“press 1 for English, press 2 for Spanish”), after which they hear the department options in the language they chose.
No, the phone menu comes at no extra cost with Customer Service, however many options or levels you use.
