One principle does most of the work
A caller is not browsing. They have one thing they want, they are often doing something else at the same time, and their tolerance for your menu is roughly ten seconds. Every design decision follows from that.
Design the menu around what callers are ringing about, in descending order of how often they ring about it. Not around your departments, your staff, or how you would like the business to be organised.
The test is simple: write down the last twenty calls your business took and sort them into piles. The piles are your menu. If two piles are tiny and go to the same person, they are one option. If one pile is enormous, it is option 1.
How many options
You can have up to nine. You should almost certainly have three or four.
The reason is not a rule about attention spans; it is that a caller has to hold the whole list in their head until they hear the one they want. At three options they are choosing. At seven they are memorising, and a caller who is memorising is a caller who presses something wrong or hangs up and rings a competitor.
Two is often correct and under-used. A great many small businesses genuinely have exactly two kinds of call: I want to become a customer and I am already a customer and something is wrong. Those two calls want completely different people, urgency and tone. A two-option menu that splits them cleanly beats a five-option menu that splits them badly.
If you find yourself needing more than four, the usual cause is that one option is doing too much work. Put a sub-menu behind that one option rather than flattening everything onto the top level: the caller who needs the detail gets it, and the other eighty per cent never hear it.
Ring together, or ring in order?
This is the decision that changes how the business feels to a customer, and there is a clean way to decide.
Ring everyone at once when the answer is "whoever is free"
All the phones ring, the first person to pick up gets the call, everyone else stops ringing. Use it for new enquiries, the general line, the front office, anything where the caller does not care who answers and you just want the call caught.
It is the fastest way to answer a call and the right default for most small teams. The cost is that everybody's phone rings, which is fine for three people in a van and irritating for eight people in a quiet room.
Ring in order when there is a real hierarchy
The first phone rings for a set time, and if nobody answers it moves to the next. Use it when there genuinely is a person who should normally take this call, with a named backup behind them: the account manager, then their colleague, then the office.
The cost is time. Every hop is dead air for the caller. Two hops is usually the practical limit before the caller concludes nobody is there.
Long sequential chains. Four people at twenty seconds each is eighty seconds of ringing, and almost nobody waits eighty seconds. If you have four people who could all take the call, that is the definition of a ring-everyone-at-once group, not a chain.
After hours is where the money is
You set a schedule, and outside it callers hear a different greeting that can route them somewhere else entirely. Most businesses set this once, badly, and never look at it again.
The right answer depends entirely on whether your out-of-hours calls are valuable or merely inconvenient, and businesses differ sharply:
- If late calls are emergencies you want — trades, veterinary, property maintenance, anything where a customer has a problem that is getting worse by the hour — the after-hours greeting should offer a way through to a real phone. "If this is an emergency, press 1", pointed at whoever is on call. The self-selection does the filtering for you: almost nobody presses the emergency option for something that is not one.
- If late calls are never urgent — professional services, most retail, anything that cannot act until morning — say so plainly, say when you open, and take a voicemail. A caller told clearly that you open at eight will ring back at eight. A caller left ringing assumes you are gone.
Weekends usually deserve their own answer rather than inheriting the weekday evening rule, and so do public holidays, which are the single most common source of a greeting that tells callers you are open when you are not.
Plan for nobody answering
Every route needs an end. If a call rings out, it takes a voicemail and the recording plus a written transcript arrive by email.
Two things make that materially more useful. First, send it somewhere more than one person reads, because a voicemail in one person's inbox while that person is on holiday is a lost customer. Second, say in the greeting what will happen: "leave a message and we will call you back this morning" sets an expectation you can meet, and a caller who knows when to expect a call back stops ringing your competitors in the meantime.
The mistakes worth naming
The dead end. An option that rings a phone nobody carries any more. This happens to every business within a year of setting up a menu, because people change roles and nobody updates the phone tree. Ring every option yourself once a quarter; it takes four minutes.
The greeting that is an advertisement. Nobody has ever been sold to by hold copy. The caller is trying to get something done.
Reading out your website address. The caller is on the phone. If they wanted the website they would be on the website.
Options that mean nothing to a customer. "Press 2 for Client Services" assumes the caller knows how you divide your work. "Press 2 if something you have already bought has gone wrong" does not.
No way to reach a human. If every option is a sub-menu and none of them eventually reaches a person, you have built a maze. There should always be a path to somebody, and for a small business that path should be short.
Setting it and never listening to it. Ring your own business number once a month, from a phone that is not yours, and listen to the whole thing. It is the cheapest customer research available and almost nobody does it.
Further reading
Longer research pieces on this topic, each with its own source list and a downloadable PDF.