Designing a phone menu people do not hate.

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 patience for your menu is short. Every design decision follows from that.

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. For worked wording, the phone menu script library has templates for six business shapes.

How many options

Auto Attendant allows up to seven. 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 you are splitting calls the caller cannot tell apart, or giving each person their own option when the same person answers both. Merge options that end at the same phone. In Auto Attendant an option rings a phone, takes a voicemail or plays a message; it does not open a second menu, so the list the caller hears is the whole menu. Systems that offer sub-menus let you hide detail behind one option, at the cost of a longer path to a person.

Who each option rings

In Auto Attendant each option rings up to three phones, one after another: a team member's mobile, a landline or another US or Canadian number, including a toll-free one (never another Auto Attendant line). Each phone rings for 10 to 60 seconds that you choose, for example the employee for 20 seconds and then the owner. If nobody answers, the caller leaves a voicemail. The forwarded call shows your business number as the caller ID, so the person answering knows it is a work call. Ringing is sequential only: an option never rings several phones at once.

So the design question is who should take each kind of call first, and who is the backup. Put the person who handles that call most days first, then at most two backups, and give everyone else a different option or a voicemail. When the person behind an option changes (holidays, a new hire, someone moving roles), change the number in the menu and publish it; the dashboard keeps the menu history so you can restore the previous version.

General practice: ringing several phones. Many phone systems can ring a group of phones for one option, either together or in order. Auto Attendant rings phones in order, up to three per option, and never together; the patterns below are worth knowing when you compare systems.

On other systems: 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.

On systems that offer it, it is the fastest way to answer a call. 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. Auto Attendant does this, with up to three phones. 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, so keep each ring short.

Ring groups, hunt groups and call queues are often confused; this comparison sets out what each does when everyone is busy, and how many lines you need covers how many calls can arrive at once.

After hours is where the money is

You set business hours for each day of the week, in your time zone (Pacific, Mountain, Arizona, Central, Eastern or Atlantic), and mark holidays, which are closed all day. Outside those hours callers hear your closed message, and then either leave a voicemail or hear the message and the call ends. Calls are not forwarded to anyone after hours. Most businesses set their hours once, badly, and never look at them 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 closed message should say exactly how fast messages are picked up, and someone should actually check the voicemail emails on that schedule. If you need late calls to ring a real phone, extend your business hours to cover the time someone is on call, so an urgent option rings that person's phone. Say what an emergency means for your business so callers can decide whether to leave a message or call back in the morning.
• 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.

Where an urgent option rings whoever is on call during your hours, the rota behind it matters as much as the greeting: see building an after-hours on-call plan for a small trade team.

Plan for nobody answering

Every route needs an end. A voicemail option, and the closed message outside hours, take a message that is emailed to the recipients you choose with the MP3 attached; the transcript follows in a second email when transcription produces text. The dashboard lists every voicemail to play, read or delete, and keeps each recording for 365 days. For an option that rings someone's phone, ring it yourself and let it ring out, so you know what a caller hears when that person cannot pick up.

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.

Some businesses add an automatic text message after a missed call (Auto Attendant does not send or receive texts). It carries consent and registration obligations worth reading first: missed call text-back, risks and checklist.

Menus in English, French and Spanish

A menu can be in English, in French, in Spanish, or in up to all three on one line, spoken by a text-to-speech voice from the wording you write (you cannot upload your own recording; we can adjust the wording of prompts on request). The French voice and wording are Canadian French ("faites le 1", "heure de l'Est"), not a translation read in a European accent. The Spanish voice is a US Spanish one, and the prompts and the spoken business hours are in Spanish too ("de lunes a viernes, de 8 de la mañana a 5 de la tarde, hora del Este").

Two ways to let callers choose a language. When a line has more than one language you pick how callers choose. Language first asks before anything else: "For English, press 1. Para español, oprima el 2." A key at the end of the menu offers the choice after the options: 7 for Spanish, 8 for French, 9 for English ("For service in English, press 9", "Pour le service en français, faites le 8"). In that mode those keys are kept for the language choice, so the options use the other keys, still up to seven of them, and every option needs its label in each language. Pressing a language key replays the greeting and the menu in that language.

Quebec callers start in French. With the language key at the end of the menu, a call from one of the twelve Quebec area codes (263, 354, 367, 418, 438, 450, 468, 514, 579, 581, 819 and 873, listed on the Quebec area-code page) is answered in French first, and every other caller hears your primary language first. After hours there is no language choice: the caller hears the closed message in the language they started in. With language first, every caller is asked before anything else.

Which layout to choose. A business in Quebec, or one that serves Quebec customers, usually puts French first. A business elsewhere in Canada with francophone customers usually puts English first and offers French. Keep the option labels short and parallel in both languages; callers hear each label once per language, and a long French label makes the menu noticeably slower. The same layout questions arise with English and Spanish; the bilingual phone menu guide works through that case. A business with Spanish-speaking customers can use language first so nobody has to listen to a menu in the wrong language.

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.

Rules and standards that touch a phone menu

Menu design is mostly judgement, but a few fixed points sit underneath it. This is general information, not legal advice; the sources are listed below so you can read the rule yourself.

The keypad is a standard. The tones a caller produces when pressing a key are DTMF signalling, with the keypad's technical features set out in ITU-T Recommendation Q.23.1 When a call crosses an IP network the digits can be carried as telephony events inside RTP packets under the IETF's RFC 4733.2 The practical point: a menu key is a digit from the keypad, so the keypad offers 0 to 9 plus the star and pound keys (this product uses up to seven options on keys 0 to 9), and a caller whose phone cannot send tones cannot press any of them. Decide in advance what happens when no key is pressed, and make sure the answer ends at a person or a voicemail rather than a repeating loop.

An emergency option is not 911. In the United States, rules for multi-line telephone systems require that a user can reach 911 directly, without dialling a prefix such as 9 first.3 Your menu applies to calls arriving at your business, not to calls your staff place to emergency services. Word an urgent option as "for an urgent job" or "if you need us out of hours" and never imply it replaces calling 911; the emergency calling page explains the distinction.

Callers who use relay services. Federal law provides telecommunications relay services so that people who are deaf, hard of hearing or speech-impaired can use the telephone.4 A relay call reaches your menu through a communications assistant who relays the conversation, which adds delay, so a menu that moves on after a few seconds of silence is harder for these callers than for others. Allow a reasonable pause after the options and keep a path to a person.

Canada. Telecommunications in Canada are governed federally by the Telecommunications Act,5 and area codes and central office codes are administered by the Canadian Numbering Administrator.6 The menu principles on this page apply unchanged. Serving Canada collects the Canadian points in one place: numbers by province, bilingual menus, 9-1-1, porting and privacy.